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Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

news.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 106 posts

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#83
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fb.html5isready.com

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.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#84

Many there comment that developing with HTML is faster. This is true only and only when you are not familiar with the native language and frameworks. Really, native SDKs have solved pretty much all the common problems. With native you implement the functionality of your app, and don't have to invent views management, list views, notifications, events management, gesture recognisers, etc. There was a post (by sencha,…

> Is this all just because of all the web devs seeing the increasing usage of smartphones and proclaiming that html is the better way, because they are too lazy even to investigate what native really offers?

Another possibility is: browsers are advanced enough to allow web apps to be possible, and as such, options other than native apps become available. Products requirements vary, and so do the devices you deploy to. There are a myriad other reasons one may weight the options and decide to develop a web app other than being lazy.

> I don't see similar push for desktop apps

I dunno. I use a number of web apps on a regular basis, Rdio being the closest thing to a native app I've used (I run it via Fluid to remove some cognitive gaps). Also, what about Chromebooks? Google's been aggressively pushing that. I think it just may be that more apps get developed for mobile, period, and as such the degree of interest in mobile web apps seems higher (which is ironic given how much easier it is to develop smooth web-based UX for desktop).

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#85
post #4

If facebook's HTML5 fiasco is any lesson, I would rather go with Native.

The native app didn't help much. The biggest deal with the HTML5 app was adding DOM content as the user scrolled. They were experiencing memory leaks. The native app may have fixed that part, but their backend API service was still sucking pretty badly for months after that. Even now, on an iPhone4, the performance of the native app kinda sucks. It's better on a 5 or 5s, but still fairly slow to get a JSON stream, parse it and build dynamic views.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#86
post #22

Always goes only for native. Here're why I don't go HTML5. (1) Access to low-level and platform-specific features. Whatever I do, I always eventually need it as program gets specialized, and always be frustrated on non-native platforms. Usually cross platform stuffs lack this or needlessly painful even they offer it. Also you still have to write platform specific code even they support it. (2) Freedom of development.…

> There's no computing platform doesn't support C/C++ Does that include Android devices?

Dropbox uses C++ as a cross-platform language for iOS and Android: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5rXCvu9-NM

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#87
post #26

How about kivy ( http://kivy.org/#home ) for something of a middle ground? It's a python graphical framework making heavy use of opengl via an optimised cython interface. It has fairly powerful access to the android api through pyjnius (which gives direct access to java classes) or pyobjus on ios (which is less mature but has the same idea). On the plus side, since it's native to the device (albeit with a different i…

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.

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#88
From my experience, clients generally prefer native, as the quality is so much better. Looking more closely, however, agencies / freelancers pitch HTML5 apps at a considerably lower cost than native. I've seen them come in at half the cost.

What would the result be if you got 2 developers, 1 with 5 years experience building HTML5 apps and 1 with 5 years building native apps, and gave them 3 months to create an apps for Android and iOS?

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#89
post #21

HTML5 is designed to run in a browser which is always on. Native development is designed so that the user can switch betweens apps easily, without having an app to be slow. Also with native you have access to the full device api such as sensors. HTML5 is closing the gap, but Native increases the gap every few months. Mind the gap.

1. Close tab/window.

2. Use Page Visibility API[0] to throttle app.

I'm frankly just unclear on why so many of us are answering the question "What works...?" when clearly the question is "Which do you PREFER?"

[0]: http://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/3351

Re: Poll: HTML 5 or Native mobile development ?

#90
post #49

tl;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.

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