“Write once, attempt to debug everywhere” is probably way more accurate than “Write once, run anywhere” – at least for GUI apps. There’s something rather special about ideas that are theoretically amazingly wonderful yet end up being a major pain in the butt when you try to put them in practice, isn’t it?

The older Wikipedia App happened to be in PhoneGap, and I consider it one of my biggest blunders to not have torn it down on day 0 and rewritten it in something saner. I once started writing a blog post for the Wikimedia Blog about why we switched from PhoneGap to native apps, but it was killed for having too much profanity in it :) Someday, perhaps.