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What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

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Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#31

Post by jbail »

nikcub wrote: post #12

html5 will steadily wire up the missing features over the next few years with WebGL, device API workgroup[1], notifications api[2], video and audio tags etc. the problem is that vendors will have a conflict in implementing those features since they will compete with their native apps and app stores Apple and Google will need developer pressure to keep them honest, and hopefully give us access to the appstore upside o…

I think Apple and Google can protect their distribution channels and support mobile web as an equal to native.

They can maintain the same approval processes, charge the same fees, and enforce submissions of your mobile apps to the same places if you want inclusion in their app stores.

For mobile web, it could be as simple as compressing a folder of specially named HTML and JS files or providing an absolute URL where the main "executable" HTML file lives.

In the end, Apple and Google can make the same amount of money from mobile apps vs native apps. I don't find many reasons they would care how the app is made (except that maybe they want "exclusive" apps that are only on one platform or the other --- or they want to not include absolute URL mobile web apps because you can submit an app and change it entirely the next day by changing the files on your server...though you could get around this by mandating that your app be submitted as packaged HTML/JS)

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#32

Post by ignifero »

potatolicious wrote: post #28
ignifero wrote: post #21

Why doesn't HTML5 include support for camera input, accelerometer, compass & voice commands? How long before these are integrated?

Because it will never end. Today it's camera, accelerometer, compass, and voice commands... tomorrow it'll be something else. Right now, since apps are predominantly native, a vendor can add new hardware and capabilities to their devices without the prior blessing of a standards body. Standards bodies will always be several years behind the state of the art in features, which means anything really compelling and new…

Well, geolocation didn't take long to incorporate, hopefully the rest will follow.

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#33

Post by potatolicious »

ignifero wrote: post #32
potatolicious wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it will never end. Today it's camera, accelerometer, compass, and voice commands... tomorrow it'll be something else. Right now, since apps are predominantly native, a vendor can add new hardware and capabilities to their devices without the prior blessing of a standards body. Standards bodies will always be several years behind the state of the art in features, which means anything really compelling and new…

Well, geolocation didn't take long to incorporate, hopefully the rest will follow.

Didn't take long to incorporate into the spec (even then, it's practically light speed by W3C standards, and a tortoise crawl by native standards)... but support in the wild is still pretty pathetic.

As long as IE lives, web standards will move at a snail's pace. I'd say we're >5 years (probably more!) out from being able to, in general, expect something like geolocation to be supported in your average user.

If you want to move faster than the competition and give more hardware/features to your users, you're still going native.

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#34

Post by ignifero »

potatolicious wrote: post #33
ignifero wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, geolocation didn't take long to incorporate, hopefully the rest will follow.

Didn't take long to incorporate into the spec (even then, it's practically light speed by W3C standards, and a tortoise crawl by native standards)... but support in the wild is still pretty pathetic. As long as IE lives, web standards will move at a snail's pace. I'd say we're >5 years (probably more!) out from being able to, in general, expect something like geolocation to be supported in your average user. If you w…

it works decently on webkit browsers (and palm os i think, and nokia). The thing is there should be at least drafts for camera or voice support in webkit, simply because there is a need for it (Or else there wouldn't be projects like phonegap or titanium). With the proliferation of tablets and more and more mobile devices, going native will soon be a sisyphean task.

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#35

Post by nikcub »

jbail wrote: post #31
nikcub wrote: post #12

html5 will steadily wire up the missing features over the next few years with WebGL, device API workgroup[1], notifications api[2], video and audio tags etc. the problem is that vendors will have a conflict in implementing those features since they will compete with their native apps and app stores Apple and Google will need developer pressure to keep them honest, and hopefully give us access to the appstore upside o…

I think Apple and Google can protect their distribution channels and support mobile web as an equal to native. They can maintain the same approval processes, charge the same fees, and enforce submissions of your mobile apps to the same places if you want inclusion in their app stores. For mobile web, it could be as simple as compressing a folder of specially named HTML and JS files or providing an absolute URL where…

I hope this happens, esp with the solution you outlines where the app is just the html+js+css etc. zipped up into a distro form (is there an open standard for manifest files in this type of distribution of web app?).

The only thing I can see possibly being a concern is UI consistency - web apps are a free-for-all. Apple may release a UI kit

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#36

Post by frankus »

Aaron Hillegass gave a great talk incorporating this topic at the Voices That Matter conference in Seattle a few weeks ago.

He made a few assumptions about the type of project that a client might ask the "web or native" question about, where there is a certain amount of backend work, a certain amount of design work, and a certain amount of presentation-layer work, either native or HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

The backend and design work scale identically for web and native apps as you move from "prototype" to "usable app" to "delightful experience". The client side work scales relatively linearly across this axis for native code, but tends to rise exponentially for a web app.

He actually said that couldn't really think of any good examples of a "delightful experience" in a web app, particularly on mobile. He cited the example of one of the top web companies on the planet working for years to build what is arguably a worse word processor than the "hello world" example code included in most native platform SDKs.

Another issue is that once you start really trying to nail the user experience on each platform, most of the cross-platform nature of a mobile web app goes away. Sure, you can use something like PastryKit to make a web app that acts just like a native iPhone app, but then you end up with a very un-Android-like app when using it on Android.

Something like JQuery Mobile is a great way to get a usable product to market on multiple platforms quickly, but ultimately not everything that could be just a web app should be just a web app.

Re: What’s the Future? Native Apps or Mobile Web Apps?

#38

Post by drdaeman »

Either author has narrow definition of what "app" is, or he forgot a lot of apps.

I could remember CPU-intensive applications (for example, number crunching of all sorts), cryptographic applications, OS-integrated applications (VPN, network filesystems of all sorts, process monitoring, and whatever else needs to be integrated with OS), all sorts of plugins and so on.

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