Initially, PhoneGap was owned by Nitobi Software. In earlier versions, it was distributed in the form of project templates that could be used in Xcode or Eclipse to create hybrid apps. While it was easy to develop single-platform apps, it was more difficult to develop cross-platform apps (one had to create copies of the web-specific code and keep those copies synchronized across projects). Even so, many production apps were developed and hosted on app stores, and many more were developed and distributed internally within enterprises.

In 2011, Adobe purchased Nitobi Software. As part of the acquisition, the PhoneGap code was contributed to Apache and made open source. The project was ultimately renamed as Apache Cordova. Adobe kept the PhoneGap name and began maintaining a fork of Apache Cordova's code. As such, the version was changed to 2.x. Generally, the two were largely identical (with only minor variations). Since the project templates of the prior 1.x era were often problematic, the project creation transitioned to a command-line interface (CLI). Cross-platform development was now somewhat easier, though not yet ideal.

Apache Cordova 3.x was released in July 2013. It provided a new CLI that dramatically simplified cross-platform development while also making plugin installation easier and less problematic than before. It also decoupled many of the core features and distributed them as core plugins instead. This allowed developers to pick and choose which plugins they needed rather than taking them out later (which was often difficult). This means that apps written with 3.x only need to ask for the permissions they actually use, whereas under 2.x, an app would often ask for permissions it never needed.