OMG: the pain of doing a mobile HTML5 app and having it work across the entire spectrum of Android and iOS devices. OMG.
Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
101–106 of 106 posts
Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
#102tl;dr: If you can, go native all the way, but if it makes a lot of sense from biz perspective to support platforms other than iOS, HTML5 is not as bad as it seems. I recently made an app for http://productivemag.com (for iOS and soon Android) using web tech, but I also have experience in native iOS/OSX dev. I use Cordova as a wrapper around HTML5. My conclusions: - HTML5 is great for custom UI and prototyping. You ca…
Would just like to add to this answer that, as of Android 4.4, the WebView is based off of Chromium, enabling you to perform remote debugging with your chrome web developer tools (basically everything you can do on a website you can now do on a WebView). I'd still pick native any day. Control > ease.
That's true, but sometimes things work just fine 4.4 and only break on the undebuggable Jelly Bean or older ;)
Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
#103I think many people forget that "native" is a very abstract term.
"Native Android" means you are developing a single app that runs and adapts to tens of thousands of different hardware and software configurations. It would be much more native to make an app only for the Samsung Galaxy devices, and then another app only for HTC Sense. Which is what iOS and Windows phone developers do.
If we say HTML5 is a very abstract/cross platform solution, and iOS is very native approach, then Android is definately something in between. And I would say it is much more "cross platform" then it is "native".
Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
#104I'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 mig…
> HTML5 only apps are not available in the market/store
What do you mean by this? That doesn't match my understanding of the current state.
Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
#105I'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 mig…
I'm curious in how you put Titanium next to PhoneGap (Disclaimer: I may be reading too much into that, or not understanding your meaning - 2nd language etc.). My experience with Titanium is that you code in js or Alloy, then when building and deploying, you get native code, with native elements and everything. Comparing it to PhoneGap, which purely runs in a slowish WebView isn't quite fair I think. Or has your exper…
You are absolutely right: It's been a while since I last used Titanium. At the time you had to use a crappy/buggy UI to compile your app, with random bugs ocuring all the time, not being able to build once you've upgraded to a newer version due to backwards incompatible changes and more weird incompatibility bugs with other versions of XCode, and so on. I hated the experience since I couldn't rely on being able to building my app and Objective C library support wasn't available at the time or didn't work very well. I quitted using Titanium once they switched from their own buggy UI to Eclipse for building, my code was backwards incompatible, the UI couldn't compile to older versions of Titanium, I had enough. It's true, it has better performance as say a Phonegap, but it did have some weird layout issues from time to time which were hard to fix. Overall I think it's a nice product for creating an app without learning Objective C but I won't use it for a clients app any more, too unreliable.
Oh, and yes, it is 'cross-platform', except for the fact that there are so many things not working on Android (either bugs or non supported in the API for Android) that you need a seperate build for android to make it reasonably useful.
This is al based on my experience with Titanium Mobile from around 2 years ago, so it might be better now.
Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?
#106I'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 mig…
> HTML5 only apps are not available in the market/store What do you mean by this? That doesn't match my understanding of the current state.
HTML5 apps are wrapped. We did one using Native5. IT is available on app store (https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/kotak-treasury-calendar/id63...) and on Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.native5.ap....