Ask HN:When will html 5 become the standard for mobile apps?

7 points by crapiola 12 years ago | 17 comments

I think mobile apps are a very inefficient way of developing, specially if you want your product to work cross platform. Arguably, it seems to be the speed issue that keeps most companies from choosing html5. When does the HN crowd think that web technologies will become the standard for developing across mobile phones?

bikamonki 12 years ago |

The easy obstacles: Performance. Two more layers of abstraction make browser apps clunky. This will go away when phones get beefier.

Security. In Wonderland apps ask for permissions, app stores check for vulnerabilities and abuse, users read permissions and allow. In Real-land, click-buy-install-use. Browsers can also ask/warn users regarding permissions and features.

Phone Features. Can the browser access the camera, local storage, gps, address book, etc....yes, the browser is a 'native' app, it can have super powers; and then let HMTL5 use them.

The almost-impossible obstacle: the market. If you are old enough you'll remember that Windows grew like yeast b/c it had Office and that Mac kept its niche b/c it had 'designer software'. Fast forward 20 years and FF OS cannot grow as it wished b/c the phones do not run Whatsapp, the new SMS. Ergo: the apps available weight more in the purchase decision than HW or brand. So, the platform owners will do as much as possible to keep things native b/c if anything runs on anything, and if harware is mostly the same on all phones, what is the differentiator?

Did you know that only a year ago it was possible tu create a native app with basically two features: push notifications and a webview. Inside the webview you could run your web app. Now appstores reject these type of apps, they require x% of the code base/features to be native (I believe x is changing, maybe is 50 now?).

thekingshorses 12 years ago | |

That's not true at all. My app is mostly HTML5 and it is in the iOS app store and Android play store.

http://hn.premii.com/about/

> Did you know that only a year ago it was possible tu create a native app with basically two features: push notifications and a webview. Inside the webview you could run your web app. Now appstores reject these type of apps, they require x% of the code base/features to be native (I believe x is changing, maybe is 50 now?).

ironlady 12 years ago |

I would bet never. yes HTML5 is great for making responsive and mobile friendly sites and apps, and you can use it (with various tools) to compile a native app for a app store however, HTML5 will never be able to match with Objective C, or Java in terms of what can be done in a application.

tl;dr never 100%, their will always be room for real native language apps, but we will see the ratio shift more towards html5 for your basic apps and simple games year by year

anthony_franco 12 years ago |

Not for a long, long time. In the same way that web apps won't be replacing all desktop apps for a long, long time.

bighi 12 years ago | |

I would bet that this "long, long time" is like 3 or 4 years.

Liongadev 12 years ago | | |

You probably would have said the same thing 3 or 4 years ago. But hardly anything change. Your IDE, Photoshop etc. are still all desktop apps.

getshadowband 12 years ago |

Depends on what functions your app is performing. We develop web based apps and would only need a native version to access a users contact list (Maybe there is a way to do this already?). Otherwise we're pretty content without having to deal with the app stores.

joshdance 12 years ago |

I don't think it will ever become the standard. I think that it will continue to improve and more and more types of apps will be built with it. For example Flappy Bird could have been built entirely in html5 as the clones have shown us.

eukaryotia 12 years ago |

Why should it? I think we'll just stick with native applications for most serious things. The web as a platform-independent abstraction layer is not that great an idea.

moron4hire 12 years ago |

It's interesting that people forget the iPhone was originally HTML5-apps-only, there was no app store, there were no 3rd party native apps. The roots are there. They just need to be watered.

I've been tinkering with HTML5 apps for the last few years. If you're on the desktop, I don't think there is reasonably anything you can't do. On mobile, there are still a lot of problems with audio. That is very unfortunate for a host of different types of apps, but for a lot of others it is no big deal.

There are things that I'm doing with my current project, https://www.justwritedammit.com, that I just don't think would be possible without HTML5. Building a cross-platform experience has been significantly easier than Java ever allowed me to do, and I'm getting to hit more platforms. I can deploy changes NOW and I can do it 20 times a day if I want. And I have 100% feature parity between desktop and mobile.