Hello everyone,
I'm here to share my frustration :)
Few weeks ago we met a CEO of a major company that had interest in our product.
He was really excited to work with us - up till the moment he heard we haven't developed an IOS version of our product yet.
The meeting ended when he said to us something like: "I'll be glad to work with you, but only when you have both Android and IOS versions."
So, after a short discussion we made a small pivot and started developing the product almost from scratch - with PhoneGap. (Not such a big deal since most of the logic reside on the server anyway).
Now although the app is relatively basic in terms of graphics, it feels a little sluggish and slow to respond.
So we were left with a dilemma - would you make a compromise about the quality of the product just to get a first major customer you would love to have on your porfolio?
In my own experience we needed that first big customer for two reasons: the money, and the feedback from a real-world customer. Our approach was to deliver early and often, with a product that in hindsight was more "minimum" than "minimum viable", but we got good feedback and were very responsive to our customer's input. We ended up with a much better product with that deliver-early-and-iterate approach. Plus that sweet, sweet money.... But we had a customer who was cool with that, and we were cool with that, so it worked out.
Clearly you can't leave your product feeling sluggish and slow to respond, but one way you could go is to use the new iOS "prototype" to get buy-in and feedback from your new customer, with speed and responsiveness improvements as part of the improvement plan. I assume you're not married to phonegap, as your new implementation sounds like a quick-ish hack. So get your customer, get paid, get feedback, and get to work making it all better.