Slashdot Mirror
Has the Native Vs. HTML5 Mobile Debate Changed?
itwbennett writes: The tools available to developers who need to build an application once and deploy everywhere have exploded. Frameworks like famo.us, Ionic, PhoneGap, Sencha Touch, Appcelerator, Xamarin, and others are reducing the grunt work and improving the overall quality of web based mobile applications dramatically. The benefits of a build once, deploy everywhere platform are pretty obvious, but are they enough to make up for the hits to user experience?
For 99% of the applications out there, there's no reason not to do it in the browser if you're starting from scratch today. Most (useful) mobile apps simply display remote content in a way that's contextually relevant to the moment (Yelp, shopping (ordering and product reviews), *Maps, news sites, social media, etc). There's no reason for any of those to be app based. Most apps that aggregate content are poorly designed and not updated frequently. Couple that with the fact that most do not have useful offline modes (the only reason to have an app for content, IMHO), it just makes sense to optimize for the mobile browser rather than spend all the time and effort on an app. Hell, even most games I play casually have no reason being written as apps any more - any word game or puzzler would work fine in the browser.
Instead, put the effort into good mobile design and development practices. Hire good developers to optimize for JavaScript. Hire good developers to optimize your backend operations to reduce latency. Find what features are missing in HTML/JavaScript (e.g., a good client side persistence layer) and encourage the browser vendors to improve there so everyone can benefit.
For context, I develop complex scientific software. We use the browser (desktop) as our client and push the limits of what you can do there. Mobile is not far behind and should be the first choice for new development.
-Chris