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Why LinkedIn dumped HTML5 and went native for its mobile apps

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

#71

Post by marknutter »

litek wrote: post #62
marknutter wrote: post #51

Another one bites the dust. The app my team and I have been developing is an HTML5/Native hybrid app, much like LinkedIn's was, and their decision to move away from their HTML5 strategy is a bit baffling to me given how well things have worked out for us. Our app has a few native ui elements like the top bar, the bottom tabs bar, a quick add control that slides in and out, and Facebook style drawers that expose two o…

Do you use phonegap for the mobile versions, or something custom with a webview?

Phonegap, but we do a lot of custom native stuff beyond that.

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

#72

Post by DenisM »

marknutter wrote: post #51

Another one bites the dust. The app my team and I have been developing is an HTML5/Native hybrid app, much like LinkedIn's was, and their decision to move away from their HTML5 strategy is a bit baffling to me given how well things have worked out for us. Our app has a few native ui elements like the top bar, the bottom tabs bar, a quick add control that slides in and out, and Facebook style drawers that expose two o…

Do you have an idea for why both Facebook and Linked in, the two poster children of HTML5 apps, moved away from them? It can't be that they have a grudge against HTML or something...

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

#73

Post by kalms »

marknutter wrote: post #51

Another one bites the dust. The app my team and I have been developing is an HTML5/Native hybrid app, much like LinkedIn's was, and their decision to move away from their HTML5 strategy is a bit baffling to me given how well things have worked out for us. Our app has a few native ui elements like the top bar, the bottom tabs bar, a quick add control that slides in and out, and Facebook style drawers that expose two o…

Yeah, I'm reading it as: "We were too lazy to help develop the tools we were missing." - The community overall could have benefited from it.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. I love native app development. I'm just sad to see stout believers in a great technology suddenly roll over and play dead.

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

#74

Post by corresation »

akalia wrote: post #57
corresation wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ultimately it. LinkedIn is now a large business, with a very large technology team. That they can spend the time and effort to optimize each platform should surprise absolutely no one. But does it apply to you and me? In most cases, not even remotely. I was recently involved with a team building a pretty amazing, full-featured web app (in the investor information space). Out of the pure magic of HTML, most of…

> It was utter insanity, and of course LinkedIn and Facebook both appeared as if they were the benchmarks we should follow ("See, they abandoned HTML! So should we"). This story amused me to no end. About 18 months ago, I worked on a team that made the (not unanimous) decision to build a hybrid app, and those who pushed for that technology pointed to LinkedIn and Facebook as the benchmark we should follow ("See, they…

Indeed, that was an earlier iteration of the internal argument (the appeal to authority of Facebook and LinkedIn and their well known embracing of HTML). What you say is absolutely true, and the truth is that these shops are staffed with often pretty standard technology guys, but because they're big everything they say and do gets more technically credibility than it perhaps should. Recall when the startup world was rushing to listen to Digg's profound statements on databases (most of which we quickly debunked)

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

#75

Post by marknutter »

DenisM wrote: post #72
marknutter wrote: post #51

Another one bites the dust. The app my team and I have been developing is an HTML5/Native hybrid app, much like LinkedIn's was, and their decision to move away from their HTML5 strategy is a bit baffling to me given how well things have worked out for us. Our app has a few native ui elements like the top bar, the bottom tabs bar, a quick add control that slides in and out, and Facebook style drawers that expose two o…

Do you have an idea for why both Facebook and Linked in, the two poster children of HTML5 apps, moved away from them? It can't be that they have a grudge against HTML or something...

Yes, actually, I know exactly why Facebook's moved away from it: the beginnings of their HTML5 mobile strategy actually pre-dated the original iPhone, and as such they were using a strategy that didn't really make sense in the post iPhone world. Namely, the app was pulling down the mobile version of their website from the server on every request, which as you might imagine meant things were generally pretty sluggish. So it was really no different than just hitting the mobile version of Facebook with mobile Safari. Contrast this to using a javascript app that runs off the phone's file system and just makes requests to the server for JSON data, caching that data in localStorage along the way (which is what we do). That strategy is really no different than what fully-native apps do except that you're presenting and managing the data in a webView rather than a UITableView. It's much more performant with the benefit of using HTML/CSS for (cross-platform) layouts.

LinkedIn's move away from HTML5 I can't explain as well, although they do mention issues with memory management and a lack of good development tools out there. We haven't run into any issues like that but every use case is different. I do know that LinkedIn, instead of using Phonegap, wrote their own native bridge using websockets and a mini web server that would run natively that they themselves admitted wasn't the best approach. I think there's a lot of pressure, especially in large companies, to move to fully native apps these days because of all the negative press about HTML5, so instead of doubling down engineering efforts to solve problems that arise teams are much more likely to take the nuclear option and just rewrite everything in native code (twice!).

So no, it's not that they have a "grudge against HTML or something", it's that they ran into limitations due to specific circumstances unique to their products and strategies and took the safe path of going fully native to guarantee optimal performance at the cost of productivity (IMHO). If there was no native app option, they would figure out clever solutions to their problems from which the entire web community would benefit.

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

#76

Post by programminggeek »

HTML5 is not going to replace native for things over time simply because it's not the default way to do things on mobile platforms. The best chance of HTML/JS everywhere was webOS, now FirefoxOS. Everything else thus far has been a hack, even if a very pragmatic one.

HTML5 for iOS/Android is like Flash or Java applets are/were for the web.

I'm not sure why web geeks hate Flash or Java applets so much and are trying to do the same thing for mobile apps.

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

#77

Post by billions »

Just as users will try a web-app before investing in downloading the native app, companies will develop web apps before investing in native apps. Once a company has the resources to go fully native, in exchange for 5-10% more user engagement it makes sense.

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

#78

Post by aerique »

marknutter wrote: post #71
litek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use phonegap for the mobile versions, or something custom with a webview?

Phonegap, but we do a lot of custom native stuff beyond that.

Could you expand on what you mean with "custom native stuff"?

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

#79

Post by matwood »

corresation wrote: post #45
davidw wrote: post #13

Because they're big, and have the money to sink into something that's still a bit better at the margin?

This is ultimately it. LinkedIn is now a large business, with a very large technology team. That they can spend the time and effort to optimize each platform should surprise absolutely no one. But does it apply to you and me? In most cases, not even remotely. I was recently involved with a team building a pretty amazing, full-featured web app (in the investor information space). Out of the pure magic of HTML, most of…

That they can spend the time and effort to optimize each platform should surprise absolutely no one.

The first point is that you're doing this anyway with an app that has any complexity. Each mobile browser and device has its own quirks. If you're going to spend optimization time for each device you might as well go native and make the most of that time.

That this tiny team of six developers that apparently needed to fracture to start building iOS, Android, etc, clients. It was utter insanity, and of course LinkedIn and Facebook both appeared as if they were the benchmarks we should follow ("See, they abandoned HTML! So should we").

Our first mobile app was native iOS and built by 3 of us in about 8 weeks. One of the team had some iOS experience at the time. I prototyped the Android version in a weekend and we had a releasable version ~6 weeks later with 2 of us working on it. Neither of us had any prior Android experience and that other guy had never done Java.

My point is that iOS/Android apps are not hard to build natively. That time spent means you can get the best the device can offer. Of course if you're only showing a simple web page opposed to an app then html5 may make more sense, but the discussion here is about apps.

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

#80

Post by datadiver »

Too bad, as Linkedin did an amazing job optimizing their HTML5 app. See my discussion with their project lead on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552634

There is a ton of tricks LinkedIn employed to optimize their webapp. Check out their blog for a ton of ideas: http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/ What I think they failed at, is not releasing their code open source. Then the community would have helped them find the memory leaks and other edge cases.

So I consider it a call to arms, let's build an amazing mobile web client that employs all those tricks, things that only big companies like LinkedIn could afford to make, and better. We could turn this into a distro for JavaScript/HTML5 apps. I and my friends have started this work. Join us on github at http://github.com/urbien/urbini

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