The installation process of PhoneGap has been confusing for a long time because there were a lot of dependencies. These dependencies were due to the fact that in order to compile an app for different platforms, you not only have to have the platform-specific SDKs but also the platform-specific tool: in order to build for Android Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Android Studio is needed; to build for iOS Xcode is needed, and so on.
With Apache Cordova 2.x and 3 both the installation process and setting up your development environment have become much easier. You can now use the build services provided by Adobe, plus Cordova 2.x and 3 ships with a set of command-line tools that make it easier to develop cross-platform applications. Installing PhoneGap is now as easy as downloading the latest distribution from the website and unzip the package—you'll get the following folders:
|-doc |-lib |---android |---bada |---badaWac |---blackberry |---ios |---symbian |---webos |---windows-phone
All the necessary tools for each platform are bundled in the archive file and for OSX users using PhoneGap 2.2 or previous it's mandatory to mount the DMG file located in the lib/ios
folder and run the Cordova package available in the DMG file.