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?
The problem with frameworks is that they lower the end product to the common denominator. Instead of having an app for each platform that exploits the strengths of that platform, you end up with whatever you can manage to get to work on every platform. That works for simple apps like news websites maybe, but not when you want to integrate tightly with device hardware and how the established user base is used to interacting with their chosen platform.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
More specifically, HTML5/JS/CSS still give really shitty developer and user experiences compared to native apps. That has always been the case, and still remains true. That is why the debate has not changed.
So if you need a framework so you can pretend to have a native version of the application ... why not just focus on having a webpage instead of a shitty application which is just a web page?
This sounds like lazy people who want to claim they have an app, when all they're doing is pointing to a web page.
I can view your damned web page on my own.
Honestly, this is why I've started getting away from apps ... because as often as not they're badly written, and contain a fraction of the information I can get from the website, but still insist on having access to my contact list and messages.
Most people writing apps care more about invading my privacy and selling ads than actually providing me anything useful.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Many stuff can be done just fine in a web application. Banking, online shopping, quiz-style games, cellphone operator "my account"-style app. Even Facebook is fine as a web page unless you want those notifications (not having them is a feature IMO).
Some stuff still need to be an a native application. Camera, music player, email, chat, maps/GPS navigation, calendar. Most 3D games also benefit from being native.
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
The author of the blog post that started this discussion owns a software consultancy that specializes in native application development (iOS and Android). Clearly his opinion is that native apps are better.
If you are Target and I just want to see what you have available in your store, then no, you don't need an app.
If you farm out to lazy app developers that simply ask for every permission on the phone, then no, you don't need an app.
And if you make a phone-specific version of your site, it will almost always end up crippled.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Facebook gave up too early. On the other hand, Facebook can afford the development cost of native. For many other applications, native is unaffordable, especially for multiple platforms.
(Thank you, though, Facebook, for (before giving up on hybrid) figuring-out how to shut off the *&^%$#! iOS WebView "accessory view", and using your Facebook-powers to cow Apple into looking the other way when apps go digging into the virtual keyboard windows to shut that evil thing off...)
Embedded WebViews have gotten much better. Android has been the laggard, with awful animation/transition performance and glitchiness prior to 4.x, and user reluctance to upgrade OS (improved now) and inability to upgrade on many devices (alas, not much improved, so many Android devices cannot be upgraded to latest OS.)
Certainly, on iOS at least, I think most users would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between well-written hybrid apps and native.
I use (Zebra, was Motorola, and before that RhoMobile) Rhodes. I've also developed using PhoneGap/Cordova. I would not do a large project in PhoneGap/Cordova, because everything has to be done in Javascript. With Rhodes, I write models and controllers in Ruby, views in ERB (wish it had a better template language...) and code that touches the UI directly in Javascript. It's a very comfortable platform if you have been a Rails developer, because it's very similar - the server has been placed in the application.
I'd say at least half my development time is spent with JS and CSS (actually, I use SCSS). I see that as a good thing. I can tweak the UI interactively by twiddling CSS in Safari or Chrome desktop (developer tools for both can connect remotely to a device for inspection/debug/experiment.) I can easily teach a designer to do that themselves. Contrast that to the painful process of tweaking a native UI, being forced to use platform-unique tools and go through a slow and painful build process to see the smallest result.
I've been working with a small team implementing a number of similar energy-conservation apps (they are used by professional energy auditors - organizations are opinionated, that's why there are 6 apps...). I really think the effort would have been insurmountable had it been done with native code. This is not a typical consumer app with a few screens, but ones with dozens of pages of data-collection forms (per audited building). It's not your typical consumer app with some kind of silly one-page dashboard with text in circles...
If I had to do something with charts/graphs, I certainly would leverage the great JS libraries that are available, rather than struggling with native code! We did do a little sketch tool in JS (sketch over photos for annotation - just browser API) and nobody would ever know it is not native.
Ultimately, we abandoned Android (at least for now) due to poor performance and Balkanization, but I can see Android being supported in the future again.
I have not used Xamarin. It seems the worst of all worlds to me. You have to use the native API of each platform, but you write in a common language (C# yuck!). Where is the saving in development time here?
I strongly disagree with the bit about "different screen sizes" etc. being problematical. Using HTML helps solve that problem. It's easy to create flexible layouts using responsive CSS. Yes, native platforms have gotten better about this. But it's impossible to get designers directly involved, using the tools that they are familiar with. They still have to toss wire-frames "over the cubical wall" and the battle it out with programmers as to whether their fantasy UIs are even possible. With HTML5, they can work with what they are familiar with and provide complete solutions for UI bits. As well, there is an amazing volume of free and really quite high-quality resources for CSS3 effects, etc. that can be leveraged.
Yea, if you have a million-dollar budget for a small app, go for native. The rest o
Are web apps as amazing as native apps? No. And i doubt they ever will be. However, the time it takes to develop a native app vs a web-comparable app is immensely different. Web apps are infinitely easier to create and deploy. The question is if it's worth spending 2-5x the amount of money/effort to provide that level of immersion. To many it's not. Especially if your user base is small.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and we have internal web apps that serve anywhere from 10 - 10K people. There is little justification to make native apps that essentially do the same thing when we can put a wrapper on it and call it a day. Having an immersive app needs some serious justification for that level immersion when your throwing around $100Ks of develop/maintenance costs.
Definitely not a shitty developer experience, I have written both natives on android and mobile web apps and mobile web apps are much easier and less error-prone to write.
And most phones have all the horsepower and HTML engine quality to pull off a lot of the sorts of user experiences you'd like (there are still rough spots though).
The device APIs in HTML5 now cover almost all the native capabilities you would want, once ServiceWorker and push notifications are fully deployed. They actually do a -better- job when used correctly because permissions are requested as needed instead of upfront, which avoids scaring the user off as they wonder why your recipe app's update needs camera and microphone support when you add the ability for users to post a Vine video of their baked goods (for instance).
Whenever this discussion comes up, I feel like Slashdot is just filled with old crufty C++ coders who don't understand the state of the modern web, because everyone just lands flat in the "its crap" opinion instead of discussing the few missing capabilities and the specific performance issues they've seen.
The web ain't perfect (yet) but its getting better every day, and has no vendor lock in or censorship issues like the mobile walled gardens have.
However, the time it takes to develop a native app vs a web-comparable app is immensely different. Web apps are infinitely easier to create and deploy.
Only if the "app" consists of a pull-down menu, a fill-in form and a database. Now try to do a 3D FPS game app, using OpenGL, with HTML5. Is it theoretically possible? Sure. But it will be incredibly difficult to manage polygons, scenes, frame buffers, etc. in a language where an integer is a float, and a float is sometimes a string, where the only data structures are arrays and hashes, and errors are almost never caught by the compiler.
I have written apps in both native code and Html5+Javascript. Html5+JS is almost always my first choice if I just need to slap together an interface to some backend service. But I would never go that route for an app that requires structure, planning, teamwork, and real engineering.