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Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

Dear author,

(OP as well)

It is not clear from your website what type of applications you have developed so far for iOS which make it hard to "judge" your choice whether or not you were right about choosing native over HTML5.

But I wish to remind us all that those two can, and in many cases should be combined.

If we take Google iPad suite or Twitter formal client, they are iOS apps which render content through the webkit object.

If your app deals with data which resides on the web, and with loads of it, perhaps rendering the presentation layer in HTML5 is not a bad choice as your "elite-ios-wiling-to-pay" customers are indifference about it, while at the same time, you can win the other market (Android).

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Taking twitter for example, it is rendering content in a native app when you're looking at tweets. The content is delivered in json (or whatever) standard format and rendered in native controls, namely tableViewCells. Webkit is used if you look at a web page... but otherwise it is native.

The flexibility and quality you get by taking web "content" via json (rather than HTML) and rendering it natively is a huge win.

I don't see android customers paying for websites wrapped in an app anymore than I see iOS users paying for it, actually less.

Of course if you're making SaaS such as base camp then you can do native clients on either platform.... and sell them successfully... while selling a specialized web browser (That just gives you the base camp website in WebKit) wouldn't likely fly.

The only part of Twitter's native apps for iOS that use a UIWebview are when rendering a single tweet since in that specific use case, it's simpler and faster to render links that way rather than deal with rendering it via Core Text. Every other screen in the app is natively drawn. I don't think Twitter's app is a particularly good example.

> "elite-ios-wiling-to-pay" customers are indifference about it

They are? Are you just throwing that out there or is there some research you can back that up with? In my experience, from watching users use hybrid applications (that is, native app shells around web content) they're perplexed about why things look "a little wrong" and the scrolling is "not as fast" as other apps.

Note: I design/develop Mac & iOS apps.

On the iPad version of Twitter, even the Tweets appear to be rendered with CoreText. The only place WebKit seems to be used is when you are actually looking at a web page.

Most often webkit is being used because that's how you put multiple formatting styles in one UI component. It's the recommended by Apple way to do it. UILabel and UITextView will only be one font. You can't type this, then italicize the date. Instead, you just use UIWebView, pass it the string of html that formats your text the way you want, and you're off.

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