title: phone gap vs monotouch for data intensive app
body: <p>We are looking to develop a data intensive application for mobile devices. Our central problem is</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>We will have to store quite a lot of data on the client</li>
  <li>The client wants the app to work offline</li>
  <li>Our skill set is very much web development C# ASP.Net. Definitely not Objective C</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>We have thought of three possibilities for dev</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Web application using HTML5 local storage leveraging the offline application cache.
  We are on a 5MB limit for local storage but this might be down to 2.5MB for certain browsers</p></li>
  <li><p>Web application through <a href="http://phonegap.com/">PhoneGap</a> to create a native app. 
  Big advantage here is that we can use the file system for storage. The down side is that it will have to go through App Store (for iOS especially) - 30% chuck of revenue for a subscription app to Apple</p></li>
  <li><p>We build out the app using <a href="http://xamarin.com/monotouch">MonoTouch</a> for Android and iOS.
  Good - C# and .Net we can do this. Bad - no Blackberry</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p><strong>Question</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm struggling to see any genuine advantages of using MonoTouch over PhoneGap in this instance. What are they? Are they any?</p>
  
  <p>As an example in this instance it would be really useful to save data onto the file system but I believe that phone gap can do this through the <a href="http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.0.0/phonegap_file_file.md.html#File">File object</a>. Obviously monoTouch would leverage System.IO.</p>
  
  <p>Is there instances where there is definite additional functionality in MonoTouch - particularly functions that are useful to mobile dev e.g. Geolocation or camera type functions?. Or does phone gap pretty much have all these covered.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Cheeky Additional Questions</strong></p>
  
  <p>Is there any other options I have missed or any other major advantages/disadvantages for the three approaches I have outlined that I have forgotten about?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for everyone's expertise</p>