Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

fb.html5isready.com

I've created native iOS apps, native Android apps, HTML5 apps and I've used wrappers (Titanium Mobile and PhoneGap) over the last few years and these are my findings:

- Native apps take a lot of time to build, especially when you are a web-developer without in-depth knowledge of the extensive frameworks available to the native platforms.

- Wrappers work, but are not nearly as great and snappy as native apps; They might contain a lot of hard to fix bugs as well and are harder to debug if they tend to crash.

- HTML5 only apps are not available in the market/store so no free advertising, you can't access things like the camera with HTML5 only, you therefore need a wrapper.

My vote goes to native development; Although it's more work and code to write it's much faster and stable if done correctly. You've got more freedom and bugs can be solved. A native app just feels right, where a HTML5 only app won't give you the best user experience you can get, no matter how much time you put into it. If you need a flexible, big, cross-platform app without a lot of budget to build at least 2 native apps a HTML5 app with wrapper would be a decent option, but for anything else (especially the more simple apps with just 2 or 3 different views) you should go with native.

Really? On my Nexus 7 this runs much smoother than the official Facebook app - ignoring missing features of course.

I also prefer native apps. We have heavy use of API functions and that kills ever HTML5 app

It makes sense to me to use both to a degree. The frontend and UI will greatly benefit from using HTML5 while stability will depend a lot on the native aspects.