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Native Apps Are Dead, Long Live Native Apps
cardoni writes "Dan Yoder, CTO at Border Stylo, offers insights on the current state of simultaneous iPhone / Android development using PhoneGap and his thoughts on the debate over native apps versus Web apps. Quoting: 'One problem with the debate is that it’s a false dichotomy, since you can embed a Web browser within a native application. And, conversely, you can extend an embedded Web browser to provide access to native APIs. The two alternatives have not been mutually exclusive for years now. And, focusing on the strengths of native applications ignores the benefits of Web applications. For example, there’s the appeal of writing code that will run on a variety of different devices, ranging from mobile phones, to tablets, to laptops, even to gaming consoles. Virtually every major device platform now sports a Web browser, and it can often be discreetly embedded within a native application. To boot, much of this code can be tested using a Web browser, which enables more easily automated testing. It’s also easier to find Web developers than it is to find native developers.'"
Everything looks like a nail. Web apps are nice and play in a certain application space. Same with Native apps. Saying that one is "better" than another isn't fair since the apps themselves are different, with different constraints (how do I access a file on the users local filesystem seamlessly from a web app?). If I was going for "I'm going to write an application to conquer the world" approach, I would probably want it to run on iPhone and Android, so a web app is probably a good option. However, if I know my application is fixed to one piece of hardware (the newest iPhone for example) a native app is better since I can access more of the hardware with a native application.
"It’s also easier to find Web developers than it is to find native developers." A good programmer shouldn't really care what level he is working in, best practices etc. are fundamentally the same. Every decent programmer I know has dabbled in everything from assembler to javascript, at the very least. The good ones have written large applications in both or more. Making this a useless dichotomy, because whatever the application a poor programmer can drag an entire team or application down on his own.
Well... running on many platforms sounds nicer than it actually is.
You tend to end up with an app that is tailored to the lowest common denominator of the platforms.
If you want to shine, you will want to go native.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Android and iOS have very different UI conventions. TFA mentions the problem but then ignores it. By using PhoneGap (or any of the other similar products) you still need to build two different apps if you want to get good results. Just look at PhoneGap's featured apps examples. Almost every single one of them is written for iOS. If you bring them to Android users wont accept them as native. They will feel wrong. I wrote a post about this very problem into my blog few weeks back: http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/06/differences-between-android-and-ios-ui.html Benefit of PhoneGap etc. is that you can use web technologies to write the apps. It is a false hope, though, if you expect to "write once, run everywhere". Juhani
If you're a native application developer, I suspect that you'd be absolutely miserable if you ever had to work on web apps full-time.
Web app development is challenging for all of the wrong reasons. Whether it's having to use horrid languages like JavaScript or PHP, or dealing with broken browsers like IE6, or dealing with shitty MySQL databases "designed" by people who didn't understand even basic relational theory, you won't find much enjoyable about it.
At least native applications are often built using real programming languages like C and C++. Even semi-native languages like Java, C# and, dare I say it, VB.NET, are much, much, much more enjoyable to use than JavaScript or PHP, or dealing with broken HTML, or fighting with stylesheets.
I'm glad I was able to retire without having to do too much web development. Everything about it was decades behind where native applications were at the time, and things still haven't changed.
It really does become the "Write once, debug everywhere," thing. Unless you are using very simple HTML and pretty much no interactivity, at which point you are a web site not a web app, you are going to have to have a shitload of "gotchas" and different cases. Not just for major different platforms like Android, Windows, etc but for different browsers.
Now if you want to do all that, well and good, but be serious about the amount of effort it takes and the amount of time savings, if any, over doing things native.
For complex applications, there isn't a "Just write it once," way of doing things.
and the reason is that with all the utility of HTML / CSS / JavaScript it is still brittle
DOM is getting even more bloated, inefficient and slow. CSS is out of control and when put to the extreme it is like reading RegEx that you didn't write that has 400 expressions in one string. That coupled with differences in even handling the box model between IE and everyone else is enough to drive a sane person over the edge, especialy with the kludges in CSS that were glued on to handle those problems.
JavaScript is supposed to be the language used to manipulate the Document Object but it was so poorly implemented that jQuery was required to make it reasonably useful.
For those reasons people keep writing native apps that work correctly the first time out of the gate.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!