Future of Mobile: a case of HTML5 or iOS… really? | Hacker News Reader

Future of Mobile: a case of HTML5 or iOS… really?

trigger.io

17 pointsamirnathoo11 comments

> This growth is despite Android’s so-called fragmentation problems. Android’s share is growing because the carriers have flexibility in how they distribute it and end users could not care less about ‘fragmentation’. That is a problem for developers, sure, but it is not affecting adoption by end-users.

a) developers who develop on Android rarely develop for all fragmented versions (or skew releases to not support old versions - the fragmentation does take resources and the effect shrinks your market) so grouping them together is kind of a misnomer - though I get it, and b) android apps still tend to make much less money than iOS apps. So there are lot more dimensions missing to that analysis, especially if this is targeted to developers.

> But what about the next 5-10 years? Won’t all these native features be incorporated into HTML6? Perhaps current features like camera access will be, but I bet that by that time there’ll be a ton of new device types and underlying features that aren’t.

Web technologies have always been playing catch up, and I'll take that bet.

> It’s not possible to create Instagram with HTML5

But it was possible to create facebook with it, which is worth 100x Instagram. This point is irrelevant in every way except the recent news.

I agree with your overall point, but you overreach on a lot of your arguments. Seems like you just wrote it to write it.

The point with Android is that developers will follow what consumers adopt. They'll put up with Android fragmentation in the same way they put up with the App Store approval process - because they have to.

Facebook have listed mobile as a risk in their S-1. When they started they didn't have the mobile risk.

> I agree with your overall point, but you overreach on a lot of your arguments. Seems like you just wrote it to write it.

I don't think I'm over-reaching. What are the arguments that you would present resulting in the same conclusion that aren't over-reaching?

Is that actually true? Are there more developers on Android than iOS right now? (Honestly don't know).

Should it be true? It seems like general consensus that the android app store is much harder to make money in than iOS.

Facebook did list mobile as a risk on their S1, but they listed THEIR mobile app as a risk. They are worried that if they put ads on it mobile use will drop significantly. If they listed other mobile stuff as well, I've forgotten and please point it out.

Ok, I can respond to this, but what about your agreement with the conclusion, and the arguments that you would make to support it?

No, I would bet that there are not more developers on Android than iOS right now, and more money is being made on iOS. Do you think the gap is widening or getting smaller? Given that Android as an app market didn't exist 2 years ago, I'm betting the latter.

> Instagram is used as an example in the deck itself. Thing is, Instagram kind of relies on you to be able to take photos using the camera on your mobile device, and you can’t do that in HTML5!

Must not have heard of Media Capture: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/

It won't be long before most browsers support this including mobile safari, it's just a matter of time.

I used to think this way but media capture, file API, location API, WebGL and toolkits like Sencha Touch, will narrow the gap so much most apps will just fine a chrome-less web-clip on iOS and indistinguishable from a native app.

> it's just a matter of time

Sure. But if you're developing now you have to deal with what you've got - the Instagram founders did not say "we'll wait for this to become standardized".

The article however was on the future of mobile not the now of mobile.

In the future you will not need a native app to capture images from the camera of a mobile device hence the premise is incorrect.

Yes, and by that time capturing images will not be a differentiating feature for app developers, or novel for end-users.

Some other feature will be, and it'll be native.

I talked about this point in the article.

True, but Instagram founders also did not use a cross platform framework. They have developed for iPhone and only after almost 2 years they have developed an Android app, no?

Instagram did not and should not have used a cross-platform framework, we're agreed on that. Plenty of other people and companies should though.

Fact remains that cross-platform is here to stay. HTML5 or iOS alone are not going to win the whole market.

Another point to consider is that you can rarely get away with building a native mobile app alone. Unless you create a beautiful utility that is a standalone experience, you'll want to be able to re-engage users via email and perhaps spread the word via Facebook or Twitter, and that requires that you have a regular website for people to land on, and perhaps interact with your app a little bit to increase the chances that they'll download it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com