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Comment by arn | Hacker News Reader

The main limitation is not technical in nature. The App Store is a marketing force that you get benefit simply by releasing a native app.

Can you name any good HTML/CSS/JS iOS "apps"? Either there aren't many (any?) or people don't know about them (which is basically the same thing)

edit: responses noted, guess I didn't read carefully enough

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37Signals Chalk is the first that comes to mind. But we're doing a few of these apps where I work, and my HTML5 and CSS3 book shows how to do an offline app with the Web SQL storage API too. This is actually really cool stuff when you think about applications for business. You're not gonna write games with it, but you can make usable interfaces for your apps.

And if you feel the need to be on the app store, grab Titanium, use the Titanium.UI.webview control and point it at your mobile site. We're proably going to do that to make a few of our web apps show up on the stores, because we don't have the resources to develop native Android / IOS versions of the apps we are building. So we'll do Rails apps with HTML5 / CSS3 / JS and jQTouch or jQuery Mobile, and wrap them if people demand appstore access.

Apple have rejected apps in the past that do nothing more than point to a website. A common way to get around that is to implement a feature in native code, e.g. a banking app that points to the website, but has native mapping functionality for finding branches. I am not sure, but I think it's now covered under clause 12.3[1] of the guidelines[2].

1. Apps that are simply web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links, may be rejected.

2. https://developer.apple.com/appstore/resources/approval/guid...

You'd likely never even know that an HTML5 app wrapped in PhoneGap or Titanium wasn't native. There are many of those on the app store already. In fact, the subtitle of the book specifically mentions the app store: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa.

Application that depends on the native browser of the iPhone, such as PhoneGap based application, has severe limitation imposed by Apple on how much memory they can take.

So far, I have downloaded several applications, mostly which I don't really need, to test the experience of PhoneGap based application. I should say, given the limitation, its quite impressive. However, if you are being really picky, its easy to notice if you have say, a list on the application, scrolling the list after the view is opened (even if its the second time), the scrolling isn't so smooth and stutter a bit.

Of course, for normal people (aka non-developers), they may not notice, much else know if it is a PhoneGap application or not.

It's worth noting the response to O'reilly's own Safari To Go iPad app on the Safari Books online blog which was based on PhoneGap. The app has since been pulled from the App Store. See http://safaribooksonline.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ipad-app-s...

The book has a chapter on using PhoneGap to automatically create apps that can be submitted to the App Store, so this is not a limitation.

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