Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 105 posts

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#31

Post by iaskwhy »

namespace wrote: post #24
arocks wrote: post #2

> We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email. When we were [serving] a smaller group [of users], we were hoping we could duplicate all that mobile web work to make our clients faster in terms of code deploys. This has been my experience as well. When you click on a link in an email, the LinkedIn site would take you to the login screen. This screen is so heavy that it takes an inor…

This approach is the key to get things right on mobile. Because of its roots, common web development focuses on desktop first and mobile second. This usually means that we do: `loadContent(); if mobile: loadMobileContent();`. Instead we should build for mobile first and load desktop content when we encounter one: `loadContent(); if desktop: loadDesktopContent();`

I think a lot of use cases would actually benefit from having a branch (desktop and mobile) instead of an add-on (mobile and then desktop or vice-versa) just because the experience is completely different. If we consider generic websites and blogs, the experience is so similar using responsive design is the best approach. But if we consider web apps, like those that can improve the experience using geo data, branching can be a better fit. Responsive doesn't seem like a silver bullet.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#32

Post by kalleboo »

JackdawX wrote: post #29
monsterix wrote: post #8

Honestly, it is kind of sad, rather disastrous, that a leading site such as Linkedin is unable to stir things up a bit and come out with the exact truth. When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interes…

> When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interest. He's probably saying that the entire app is a single html page, and all the content is loaded using ajax and created programatically. This process na…

> I bet the app had a bunch of unnecessary css animations, js widgets replacing html components, custom layouts done in javascript, etc

These things are required to make an attractive app. If HTML5 can't hack it and native apps can, then HTML5 is a failure.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#33

Post by nwh »

goyalpulkit wrote: post #18
theguycalledtom wrote: post #6

> We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email Because LinkedIn are spamming scum.

Their marketing is quite aggressive (I have been receiving "Last month to get Linkedin Premium for free" weekly for about an year!) but I wouldn't call them spammers.

I've never even set foot on the website, and I get piles of emails from them. They're even worse than Facebook.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#34

Post by kalleboo »

robocat wrote: post #22

HTML5 stinks on Android (due to bugs and fragmentation) and HTML5 stinks on Win8 tablets (due to IE10 bugs, implementation differences, also supporting mouse and touch together is hard to get right due to event models). So it regularly doesn't make any sense to try and build a cross platform HTML5 solution. If you are producing a content app or business app, you might get away with it... Or if the app only needs a si…

I'd like to know why this comment was downvoted, as I've had similar experiences.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#35

Post by harshal »

threeseed wrote: post #26
monsterix wrote: post #8

Honestly, it is kind of sad, rather disastrous, that a leading site such as Linkedin is unable to stir things up a bit and come out with the exact truth. When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interes…

Really Apple hasn't given enough support for web standards ? Because I wonder where the world would be today without WebKit.

Apple deserves a lot of credit for their support for WebKit, particularly in its early days. But even old time apple webkit devs will readily admit that the existence of Mozilla made WebKit much more viable back in the day. Mac's had practically no marketshare during those days. The fact that Mozilla existed and had a reasonable amount of marketshare across platforms made it possible for Apple to ship anything other than IE as a default browser on Mac. Mozilla maintained the incentive for webdevs to support non-IE browsers, and use standards-compliant CSS. Desktop Safari as a default browser would not have been a viable product if so many webdevs had not already worked to make their sites work well with Gecko/Firefox. Webkit sends "like Gecko" in its user-agent string for a very good reason.

In other words, a lot of the web kept using standards (and not IE proprietary stuff) since they wanted to work in Mozilla browsers. And all of this content tended to also work well in webkit as well. This made Safari useful and viable. So, its at least somewhat reasonable to say that Mozilla and Firefox are perhaps primarily responsible for keeping the desktop browser market open for non-IE products. Their existence and marketshare allowed the newer browsers to compete on the basis features and performance and not be hobbled by poor website compatibility.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#36

Post by nissimk »

iaskwhy wrote: post #31
namespace wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach is the key to get things right on mobile. Because of its roots, common web development focuses on desktop first and mobile second. This usually means that we do: `loadContent(); if mobile: loadMobileContent();`. Instead we should build for mobile first and load desktop content when we encounter one: `loadContent(); if desktop: loadDesktopContent();`

I think a lot of use cases would actually benefit from having a branch (desktop and mobile) instead of an add-on (mobile and then desktop or vice-versa) just because the experience is completely different. If we consider generic websites and blogs, the experience is so similar using responsive design is the best approach. But if we consider web apps, like those that can improve the experience using geo data, branchin…

Honestly sometimes when I'm on my phone and I get a linked in email I won't click the link because the experience is so bad. I'm petty sure it starts with more than 2 possibly 4 redirects and then it shows you that spinner for a long time while it loads data. Are the ajax calls returning a lot of days that is never rendered? Are the ajax calls too slow? Why does it have to redirect so many times? Maybe if they had a mobile debugger they could figure it out.

An application like linked in should not require a native app. The website should just work well in a mobile browser.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#37

Post by endersshadow »

JackdawX wrote: post #29
monsterix wrote: post #8

Honestly, it is kind of sad, rather disastrous, that a leading site such as Linkedin is unable to stir things up a bit and come out with the exact truth. When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interes…

> When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interest. He's probably saying that the entire app is a single html page, and all the content is loaded using ajax and created programatically. This process na…

> I don't think theres any walled-garden conspiracy going on here - I honestly think this is the fault of the linkedin devs (or more likely project managers). What does a linkedin app need to do? Mostly they just need to do is display profile text and a few images inline. A mobile browser can display text and images perfectly fine - thats its bread and butter functionality. If you're having problems there, you done fucked up.

The question you actually answered is, "What I do with LinkedIn?" LinkedIn has a lot of functionality many of its users use every day. Things like groups, statuses, endorsements, recommendations, etc, etc. It's not just a resume viewer. Sit down with a competent recruiter or sales exec and watch them use it. It's rather eye-opening.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#38

Post by mbesto »

> It’s not performance issues, like speed or rendering, but it’s still a big problem.

> The second reason we’ve gone native is trying to get some of the animations — the spinners and the way they work — getting that smoothness, we felt like we needed native to really do that well.

Those are both performance issues...

> It’s not that HTML5 isn’t ready; it’s that the ecosystem doesn’t support it. … There are tools, but they’re at the beginning.

So, he's calling his team incompetent, or better yet HTML5 isn't ready.

Sounds like a whole lot of sour grapes. I'm glad Prasad and team originally pushed for HTML5, as their transparent push to strategically use HTML5 makes the ecosystem work harder. However, you're dealing with a walled garden that has very little incentive to play nice. If the experience is the same in HTML5 as the App Store, then Apple loses. At least in Google's case (with Android and Chrome) they are incentivized slightly different (by search).

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#39

Post by goyalpulkit »

I don't understand the basis behind most of the comments blaming Linkedin for making a move towards native. I think that development time and code maintainability are some of the things in favor of HTML5 apps as opposed to native ones and if even this becomes difficult with HTML5, I don't see any harm in switching to Native apps given that they will almost always be better (or at least equal) in terms of performance.

Re: Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

#40

Post by jasonlotito »

threeseed wrote: post #26
monsterix wrote: post #8

Honestly, it is kind of sad, rather disastrous, that a leading site such as Linkedin is unable to stir things up a bit and come out with the exact truth. When he says "... we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory ..." what he means here is that memory allocation to the browser on iPad (for example) is too little to handle the volume of user interes…

Really Apple hasn't given enough support for web standards ? Because I wonder where the world would be today without WebKit.

Just fine. It wasn't WebKit that helped prop up web standards. It was Mozilla.
Post reply on HN