Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#91

Post by easy_rider » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 6:59 PM UTC

nobleach wrote: post #83

easy_rider wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fastbkapp will receive the following info: your public profile, friend list, email address, custom friends lists, messages, friend requests, News Feed, relationships, relationship interests, birthday, chat status, notes, work history, status updates, education history, events, groups, hometown, interests, current city, Photos, religious and political views, videos, website, personal description and likes and your fri…

So will the native facebook app. Of COURSE the fastbkapp will receive that info.

OF COURSE. That does not mean I want to give ALL that to ANOTHER third party.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#92

Post by thenerdfiles » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

I'm confused on this question. If someone asks you, "Between a BMW that needs repair (without a sunroof) and a functional Dodge Saturn (with a sunroof), which will you prefer?" you don't answer "Well, the Dodge Saturn, because work tomorrow morning."

The question is not asking "What works?", but you're all giving that kind of answer. Is it possible to ask indeed what this question is asking? Can we detach the "I need to launch YESTERDAY!" attitude from these types of questions?

[MOAR EDIT:] Add in the qualification to the BMW/Saturn analogy that you're planning a road trip.

[EDIT:] To emphasize, the question asks, "Which will you prefer..." rather than "Which do you prefer..." It seems like the OP is trying to sideline the "functionality of today" question, which frankly given the rapid rate of growth[0] and adoption altogether[1], "what works today", "APIs available today" is largely negligible.

[0]: http://www.w3.org/wiki/Closing_the_gap_with_native

[1]: http://www.w3.org/2013/11/w3c-highlights/

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#93

Post by Edmond » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

This really depends... if you are building a consumer app, native is probably better given that you typically need access to device features...but for business apps, with few exceptions I say HTML5 hands down.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#94

Post by yesplorer » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

chrisdevereux wrote: post #55

Intestesting that the poll results (currently) only give a slight edge to native, but the comments are overwhelmingly pro-native. I can see two possible reasons for this: 1) Native developers are the more opinionated of the two. 2) People who actually have experience to communicate prefer native

and

3) nothing is stopping anyone from upvoting the two

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#95

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 8:38 PM UTC

mlangdon wrote: post #87

AbsoluteDestiny wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest downside I found with kivy is the amount of time it takes to launch the app as it has to set up the python environment et al. If that's improved with newer versions of kivy I might go back to see what it can do.

The other standard downside of kivy is the mandatory giant app footprint. Hello World is going to set you back 25mb on Android.

[deleted]

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#96

Post by _random_ » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

ohwp wrote: post #34

Native, but with the use of C# (Xamarin / Mono). And I don't think native takes more time. Debugging is much easier with native apps (imho).

Single language (one of the best as well), yet native look and feel.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#97

Post by ghaven » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 8:47 PM UTC

mlangdon wrote: post #87

AbsoluteDestiny wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest downside I found with kivy is the amount of time it takes to launch the app as it has to set up the python environment et al. If that's improved with newer versions of kivy I might go back to see what it can do.

The other standard downside of kivy is the mandatory giant app footprint. Hello World is going to set you back 25mb on Android.

I think this could be misleading...a kivy apk has a minimum size of about 6-7MB. When installed it will extract the contents but the apk remains, which more than doubles that size on the device storage. The extraction can be done to the sd card (or internal equivalent) so as not to take up system internal memory space.

It's certainly another downside of course, but to be clear to anyone reading the apks are much less than 25MB. And 25MB actually sounds like more than I'd expect even uncompressed, but I haven't looked at it much.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#98

Post by nighthawk24 » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 8:59 PM UTC

Depends on what features you want to build. If you do need access to the phone's native APIs, you WILL need to make a native app. HTML5 works great for first versions and specifically if everything can be done over back-end API.

HTML5 first, Native later. To make available more seamless "native" experience to the user.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#99

Post by subsection1h » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 9:32 PM UTC

arnorhs wrote: post #75

felxh wrote: post #68

Not having much experience with developing native mobile apps, I can only say what a pain it is to develop non trivial HTML5 apps that need to support a wide array of browsers. Your initial euphoria of 'oh wow I could make this thing for [insert browser of you choice] in less than [x amount of time]' is quickly mitigated when you try it on other browsers. Different browsers _will_ vary greatly in performance for diff…

> Not having much experience with developing native mobile apps, I can only say what a pain it is to develop non trivial HTML5 apps that need to support a wide array of browsers Multiply that pain with 10x and now you know what it's like to develop native apps. (Disclaimer: Grass is always greener etc)

How many native mobile apps have you developed? I'm curious because your GitHub repos are all JavaScript projects.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#100

Post by nkoren » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 11:41 PM UTC

CCs wrote: post #79

nkoren wrote: post #73

HTML5. My (Meteor & D3-based) application is primarily aimed desktop browsers, and it already very nearly works out of the box on mobile -- there are a few D3 touch events that need to be revisited, and a new layout that is friendlier for smaller screens; otherwise we're done. We don't need to access low-level hardware, and the idea of doing Native re-implementations of Meteor's bidirectional data bindings or D3's fo…

Looks like a cool project! Is Elon Musk involved? :) http://www.podaris.com/

Thank you! This is actually for my prior startup (probably too profitable to call a "startup" at this point, actually), http://www.futurescaper.com/. But Podaris is shaping up to be HTML5/JS from top to bottom as well. Unlike Futurescaper, it doesn't need a smartphone incarnation, and the alpha version works surprisingly well on tablets, pretty much out of the box.

No Elon Musk involvement. Yet. :-)