Monday, September 10, 2012

Mobile Development : HTML5 vs Native



That guy seems to think native is better because the web is slow, and while he clearly has a point for games (even chrome is not there yet), he's dead wrong on applications, and here's why.


  1. most applications do not use 3D
  2. the only "slow" thing in the [html5/css3/js] combo is js-loop-type visual effects (like fadeIn and that type of crap)
  3. v8 is more than decently fast for js processing, firefox is meh-but-ok
  4. most android phones today are powerful quad cores
  5. those 100% CPU web apps have very low quality code, and that has nothing to do with the technology


Every application that is not a game can be implemented just fine in html5, and will be plenty fast in most browsers.

Now for the points that "native" does not address:

More than being limited to one OS, native is limited to a few versions of  an OS.

An HTML5/CSS3/JS solution (coded to standards) works -
on a phone
on a computer
on a smart TV
on a tablet
on google glasses

So sure, while some actually design games, and some others can totally afford developing a dozen versions of each application, with a dozen platform specialists to leverage all the platform-specific goodies, the simplest approach remains our good (but evil) friend, chrome.

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