Emily Newsom

As Development Director, Emily oversees all of Brightflock's development projects. Prior to co-launching Brightflock in 2008, Emily developed enterprise Java systems for the biotechnology industry. Emily is an avid proponent of open source software (but without the beard!) and has contributed to a number of OSS projects including Firefox, Ubuntu, WordPress and Drupal. Emily holds an honors BSc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria.

My personal site can be found here

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Posted on Monday, March 4, 2013 in Android Development, Apple iOS Development, Implementation, Technology

We've been using Phonegap/Cordova for a number of cross platform apps lately and have found that we are really starting to take advantage of a lot of native plugins. One of the latest features we were looking to integrate was that of social sharing--namely, sharing items to one's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc account from the app.

On iOS, each social site (Twitter, Facebook, etc) tends to provide its own app and its own libraries in order to allow 3rd party integrations, but starting with iOS 6 Apple has followed Android's lead and integrated social functionality right into the OS itself. The benefit of the iOS social integration is that using the social features from an app is a breeze--you deal with a single api and iOS handles everything for you.

What about Phonegap/Cordova?

Now on Phonegap there is currently a ShareKit plugin. ShareKit is a social sharing toolkit that works on iOS 4.2+ (I believe) and supports a ton of sites that Apple would never integrate into iOS. ShareKit will also use the iOS social functionality if it detects iOS6. Sounds good right? Well if you've ever taken a look at ShareKit you will quickly realize it is quite the beast! For example, adding the ShareKit dependency to my last app instantly doubled its size.

So what's the alternative to ShareKit on Phonegap? Well if you're OK not supporting sharing pre-iOS6 and you want a lightweight solution, take a look at the new lightweight Social plugin that we just wrote and commited to Phonegap's github repo.

The Phonegap/Cordova iOS Social plugin

The iOS Social plugin is part of Phonegap: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-plugins/tree/master/iOS/Social

The actual repo is hosted here with more information: https://github.com/bfcam/phonegap-ios-social-plugin