Mobile Development: Cross platform languages?

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3231664/application-development/apples-swift-is-losing-developers-to-multiplatform-frameworks.html

Quoting:
"Microsoft’s Xamarin, Apache Cordova, and Ionic are replacing the use of Swift and Xcode as developers seek to maintain fewer code bases".

Naturally. The TIOBE guys say.

Mobile: Apache Cordova

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cordova

Quoting:
"Apache Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) is a mobile application development framework originally created by Nitobi. Adobe Systems purchased Nitobi in 2011, rebranded it as PhoneGap, and later released an open source version of the software called Apache Cordova.^[3] Apache Cordova enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript instead of relying on platform-specific APIs like those in Android, iOS, or Windows Phone.^[4] It enables wrapping up of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code depending upon the platform of the device. It extends the features of HTML and JavaScript to work with the device. The resulting applications are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native mobile application (because all layout rendering is done via Web views instead of the platform's native UI framework) nor purely Web-based (because they are not just Web apps, but are packaged as apps for distribution and have access to native device APIs). Mixing native and hybrid code snippets has been possible since version 1.9."

SW Development: Cross-platform development using Apache Cordova (HTML5, CSS3, JS)?

Cross-platform development using Apache Cordova (previously known as Phonegap)?

• Architectural overview of Cordova platform - Apache Cordova

Quoting:
"Apache Cordova is an open-source mobile development framework. It allows you to use standard web technologies - HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's capabilities such as sensors, data, network status, etc.

Use Apache Cordova if you are:
- a mobile developer and want to extend an application across more than one platform, without having to re-implement it with each platform's language and tool set.
- a web developer and want to deploy a web app that's packaged for distribution in various app store portals.
- a mobile developer interested in mixing native application components with a WebView (special browser window) that can access device-level APIs, or if you want to develop a plugin interface between native and WebView components."

Start here: Your first app.
Wikipedia article is here.

SW Development: Plugin based development - Apache Cordova

Q: What is a Cordova plugin?
A: A plugin is a bit of add-on code that provides JavaScript interface to native components. They allow your app to use native device capabilities beyond what is available to pure web apps.

• Plugin Search - Apache Cordova
• https://cordova.apache.org/plugins/faq.html
• [npm is the default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js]

Cordova plugins are being used for instance by Outsystems Now (native web apps) to extend functionality of the mobile apps.
Example of plugins can be seen in the first link (Plugin Search).