Making Facebook's native mobile app faster using HTML5
sencha.com
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That being said, it was really smooth on my iTouch 5G.
The demo HTML5 app also runs in Safari. The problem is that Safari's Nitro JS engine is much faster than the older JS engine used in a UIWebView (I think the restriction is supposedly due to security).
For the moment, native is still the way to go, IMO. But I've always believed that at a certain point iPhones/Androids and their browsers will be powerful and efficient enough to negate any performance drawbacks to HTML 5. I think that point might arrive by the iPhone 6 or so, when developers might feel comfortable dropping support for the iPhone 3GS and equivalent. In fact, many devs are already dropping support for the iPhone 3GS.
On android that's another game and you can forget about all those cozy animations and only devices with android 4.0+ will perform well, or at all (in my case anyway).
Also I'm really not sure why people currently associate html5 apps with bad battery life, personally I did not see any noticeable differences in usage from a native one, hell native use a lot more the gpu so it should be worse.
However the same code did run on iOS blackberry and Android. However the experience was sub-native on most devices. And we really needed to do a lot of tweaking and work to get the native look and feel on iOS.
So if you want to be the best, no matter the costs, go native. Otherwise Sencha is not a bad choice to make. It really depends on your requirements.
It seems like JavaScript is the new ActionScript.
Not even close.
The browser itself used to be too slow for many use cases which led to Flash filling in the gap, but thankfully that's rapidly changing with improved JIT VMs and HTML5 standardization efforts (WebRTC e.a.) all leading to the eventual demise of Flash.
Hence; JavaScript is the new ActionScript.
P.S. They're both just ECMAScript flavors so in that sense I would say they're very close ;)
Not really. That just happens to be the most common use of it.
Making web sites that comply to customer requirements down to pixel level, across all required target browsers is a major pain.
1. Use industry standard libraries (jQuery or a lightweight alternative.
2. Can ignore pathologically broken browsers (<=IE7 mainly)
"Holding users firmly by the balls in the cloud"? If your service already resides in the cloud, the technology you implement your client software in, hardly matters, no? Facebook app, whether is HTML5 or native, is largely unusable without a persistent internet connection. Yes, I am interested in doing less work. I do care about standards, thanks. I certainly wouldn't stand in the way of anyone wanting to learn whatever they want. If you want to build an app to learn Objective-C, all the power to you.
It's bad enough Android users have to deal with legacy apps on their own OS that still use pre Android 3.0/4.0 UI conventions (or worse, poorly slap them on top of their old interface without consideration). The only apps that should be allowed to get away with rolling their own UI are games.
How is that a fair comparison to native apps? A native app can run on one platform. Making native apps pixel-for-pixel identical on multiple platforms is way more of a pain than doing so with HTML5.
A few points:
1. The main discussion here was about HTML5 based apps using a native web-view app wrapper. That makes "OS version" and "browser version" identical, and puts you in an identical position to native apps in terms of number of platforms to deal with.
2. Even if you're dealing with multiple browser versions, there isn't very much difference between how a given version of a modern browser behaves under different OSes. And if a page works correctly in an old version of a browser, it is very unusual for it to start working incorrectly in a newer version of that browser.
3. Maintaining a single code base with special cases for different platforms is way easier than maintaining multiple disparate code bases. It's the old DRY principle.
The fact is this: writing an app and supporting multiple OSes (even multiple versions of the same OS) is hard. Doing so while making everything pixel-exact across different platforms is really hard, and usually pointless. But the idea that it would be somehow easier when maintaining entirely separate code bases is ludicrous.
2. It is always fun to see junior developers learn the quirks of CSS across browser versions of the same browser.
3. No different than methodologies for writing portable native code with the added benefit of control and performance.
> Doing so while making everything pixel-exact across different platforms is really hard, and usually pointless
Have fun talking to our Fortune 500 customers doing pixel counting on web applications, before signing the pay-check.
Ideally, HTML5 apps would automatically be completely portable everywhere, but that ideal isn't realistic. HTML5 is still great for simplifying porting (which is not to say that it is without disadvantages) because it gives you a single code base that behaves nearly identically everywhere, and then you have to tweak it. Constrain your problem to a couple of mobile browsers, and the number of tweaks drops dramatically.
Now I understand the draw of simply maintaining separate code bases. It's the same draw as the urge developers have to rewrite a project from scratch. It feels like starting with a clean slate will be more efficient than hunting down and eliminating every blemish. But that's an illusion. Working from a clean slate, you'll still be tweaking out blemish — it'll just take longer before you even have the privilege of thinking about them.
>2. It is always fun to see junior developers learn the quirks of CSS across browser versions of the same browser.
Oh, they're there. But in aggregate, they aren't as bad as working across different native platforms.
>Have fun talking to our Fortune 500 customers doing pixel counting on web applications, before signing the pay-check.
Yes, I realize that some clients require it even though it's usually pointless. Some companies have more money than sense, after all. My point was that it's hard no matter how you develop the app.
> HTML/CSS/JS is exceptionally good at building user
> interfaces.
Why is the idea to craft an app for each platform using native tools so scary? Were all those desktop apps using cross-platform toolkits successful? Or do they look alien everywhere?
I do like web. I love web. And that's why I don't like to see it turning into frankenweb.
Something about the premature roots of something evil something.
Only if your background is HTML/CSS/JS. If you have no web background, figuring out the idiosyncrasies of CSS and JS, while very doable, is still very time-consuming. I can't imagine it being any faster than someone going the native route assuming they do not have an existing web skillset to leverage.
That's true for anything. Objective-C is not exactly intuitive.
I can't believe you just said that. -- every seasoned web developer.
Genetic fallacy. For 75% of its development, HTML has been taregeted at greater things than hyperlinked text.
>It may appeal for those who know only the said technologies, but frankly, they would be better of by just learning the native instead of spending time traying to fight quirks.
I would say the opposite is true. Native doesn't protect you from quirks. On the contrary, it makes them worse. If you use HTML5, you're (eventually) dealing with standards that you can rely on so that you know your app will still work years down the road. Point your modern browser at the website for the movie Space Jam, and it works exactly the same today as it did in 1996.
But with native frameworks, you have no such security as a developer. The "standard" is defined as "whatever the documentation currently says". Apple or Google released a new OS version, and now your native app doesn't work? They phased out a feature without deprecating it first? Sorry, that's not a bug. Your software is outdated, and you need to fix it yourself.
And that's to say nothing of the power that you lose when you write native apps in today's world of walled garden app stores. Did Apple decide that your app "contains duplicate functionality" or "is very blue, and I don't like blue today"? Well I guess you could always sell your app on ... oh that's right, there's no viable way to sell your iOS app outside of the App Store, and it won't run on any other platform.
> For 75% of its development, HTML has been taregeted at
> greater things than hyperlinked text.
> If you use HTML5, you're (eventually) dealing with standards that you
> can rely on so that you know your app will still work years down the
> road.
> The "standard" is defined as "whatever the documentation currently says".
> Apple or Google released a new OS version, and now your native app doesn't work? They phased out a feature
> without deprecating it first?
> Sorry, that's not a bug. Your software is outdated, and you need to fix it yourself.
I guess your up to date web app has better luck with broken Android browser of the previous versions.
> And that's to say nothing of the power that you lose when you write native apps in today's world of walled
> garden app stores.
I lose no power. Some people are scared by walled gardens because… well, because they are supposed to get scared.
> Did Apple decide that your app "contains duplicate functionality" or "is very blue, and I don't like
> blue today"?
Oh, those scary stories of the days past. There is a name for them: FUD.
> Well I guess you could always sell your app on ... oh that's right, there's no viable way to sell
> your iOS app outside of the App Store, and it won't run on any other platform.
HTML first showed up in 1990. It started its evolution away from "hyperlinked text" with the introduction of elements like forms in 1995. It has been around for 22 years, and for 17 of those it has been for far more than hyperlinked text.
> Oh, those scary stories of the days past. There is a name for them: FUD.
I'm glad to hear that you haven't yet been bitten by placing your eggs in a basket held by a single company. Please do some research before assuming that your experience can be relied upon.
Personally, I've been bitten repeatedly. Forgive me if your screams of "FUD!" elicit a chuckle.
While the form element was probably a great improvement (I wasn't there, not until '98 until my first steps in HTML), think about literal meaning of the word "form" for a bit. It's still a document. HTML was normal documents with hyperlinks in it, add form elements and now you also got fill-in document with hyperlinks.
Yes you could potentially make web apps that way, but everything (everything) required a server-roundtrip. It may be a hard to imagine what a far cry that was from what we now consider a "web app". Every single UI change had to go through a form submission request and a response from the server that contained the entire page regardless of what was updated. "... but .. frames!", I can hear you wonder, well IMO frames weren't all that. They didn't really make selective updating possible in pretty much the same way as forms didn't really make web-apps possible either. Plus, I can't remember if there's been any time people weren't hating on frames (it broke navigation and bookmarking--sound familiar?).
I say this, because I remember discussing the idea of web-applications in 2002/03 or thereabouts with a friend in college. I had just discovered the SCRIPT SRC trick so you could actually load data from the server without reloading which was paradigm-shattering magic, at the time (the technique is still in use as part of JSONP, btw). I had already written a chat-client and it was beautiful, I wanted to pick his brain for more ideas of what to do with this new ability.
(please remember, this discussion occurred during the height of the Browser Wars, 1-2 years before the tide started turning. if you weren't there, or doing webdev at the time, imagine it 10 times worse. digital trenches, man)
My friend told me pretty much the exact sentiment I see pop up in this thread here, that HTML was intended as a document markup language, not for application building, and that while we could hack all these cool interactive features on top of a markup language, and surely these were some quite impressive feats of creative thinking, it would always remain on shaky grounds because you should build an application framework from the ground up with application framework foundations, not by bolting things onto a markup language. Back then, I knew this to be true (one picks up a few things about software design, studying CS) even though I didn't want it to be, because the tech was so cool and the possibilities so enormous (hackers should be able to relate to that feeling :) ).
Now, many years later, I got what I wished for, and my friend got to be right.
(at some point CSS and JS incompatibilities started to slowly disappear and the Browser Wars came to a sort of uneasy peace--this was a slow realization I can't really say when it happened, but I don't have to resort to black magic anymore to write a basic webpage that works in FF,IE,Chrome and Opera--particularly if I write it in Opera first)
Looking at the state of web-apps today, we are using that technology ("AJAX") to build things beyond my (I won't say "wildest") imaginations back then. But it's still clunky here and there. Javascript is still a pretty crummy language (though I love coding for that weird prototypal beast), and as soon as you write more than 5 lines of DOM-manipulation, you're going to want a framework like jQuery. And for some mysterious reason, people still manage to write JS code that works in one or two, but breaks in the latest versions of other major browsers. Minefields are hard to clean up I guess. There is more, but you get the idea--and IMO a lot of the problems can be traced back to bolting application-behaviour capabilities on top of a document markup language.
Still, I do believe we're heading in the right direction. Things can be made much cleaner than say 5 years ago, and there's new standards looming on the horizon that may make things even better. Sure, a from-the-ground-up design would have been so great and so clean. But the industry would have probably found a way to crud it up regardless. And given the global scale and heterogeneity of the Internet as a communications medium, the immense market forces that come with such an environment, personal computing capabilities over time, maybe this was the only way it could've been pulled off, who knows?
You make it sound like learning the native will magically lead to create better working apps. This is just not true.
I'm not saying going native doesn't have to potential to help developers create faster apps, but when making something like this feed, HTML5 would not seriously be a bottleneck.
And you're claiming to be a "very experienced web developer"? Dunning-Kruger much?
This requires special permission to add execute permission to memory that the app had allocated and used for data, which is pretty dangerous. So Safari gets it and 3rd party apps do not.
Even with the native app, the same poor design decisions are being repeated once again. For example, not caching data locally between screens - an especially egregious oversight in the context of mobile networking.
I think the broader issue however, is just how out of touch Mark Zuckerberg was with regards to mobile and perhaps even emerging web technology in general.
He eventually admitted to screwing up (great!), but then got it so wrong again, by declaring HTML5 as the culprit. The problem was almost certainly more attributable to people and management issues, rather than a technological misstep, irrespective of whether that resulted in a more palatable conclusion for Mr Zuckerberg's ego.
As for the Sencha demo, after installing it on my iPhone 4s it works really well, and installing it as app on the home screen makes it virtually indistinguishable from native. I think it's fair to say this is a rather significant achievement by Sencha, indeed considering it's a part time effort.
Which makes one wonder what a full time team, with the right leadership and resources, could have achieved at Facebook.
Facebook and Google tried and miserably failed, LinkedIn and Twitter are probably the ones closest to actually doing it, but users still prefer the native version, why?
One I think is a big reason is clearly visible in the video: scrolling physics are different. It's annoying and feels wrong and I think people notice even if they probably don't know how to describe it.
Maybe with this Sencha contest we'll see some good ones.
Google hasn't "miserably" failed, they use the same basic strategy that LinkedIn does; namely, a they make hybrid mobile apps where they mix both native and HTML5 components to get the best performance and flexibility. It's worked quite well for them.
Maybe I'm mistaken but Google released an official Gmail app on iOS that was basically HTML. Everyone hated it. The same goes for the situation with GMaps. Virtually no one used the web app and now Google Maps is the top ranked free app.
The original was just a wrapper for the web site which had unusually high negatives from users and reviewers alike. I never used it since I read the reviews before I actually downloaded it.
- Emulated scrolling feels wrong. This is my biggest issue.
- Slow launch and mailbox load time.
- Numerous short pauses while navigating.
It's a big improvement over the previous iteration, sure, but as a user I don't see why I should lower my standards just because Google (a company not short of engineering resources) chooses to advocate a particular technology.
There's a tech community confirmation bias at work here. I can't see what the ratings were like before the most recent version, but Gmail has a 3.5/5 rating on the App Store right now. I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users found it to be fine.
It's one thing not to listen to MG Siegler complain. It's another to excuse everyone else who complains on the App Store. They may not know the reason but they know the effect.
hahahaha
> Also, you may notice a difference in the scrolling deceleration time between the native iOS app and Fastbook. In the native app, scrolling doesn't stop for about 3s. We decided to increase friction and reduce the animation duration to 1.4s. This not only makes content ready to read faster, it also provides extra idle time for the app to buffer more items while the user is still reading existing content.
The scrolling physics are wrong because they made the horrid decision to emulate that stupid bouncy scrolling. The damn stuff makes my head hurt compared to the subtle, glow effect rather than shit bouncing around my screen. If they would let Chrome for Android handle the scrolling natively, I'm quite convinced that this app would feel as fast as the native app.
But then again, I know that I'm spoiled with Chrome for Android.
Google's current iOS apps are great, the previous releases, the ones with heavy HTML use, were definitely not. I don't think they would be shocked by this, a guess supported by the fact that they have new, completely different ones.
It's wrong for Sencha to force the bounce where it doesn't belong, but that's not what I was referring to and the physics are wrong on iOS too.
>Google's current iOS apps are great, the previous releases, the ones with heavy HTML use, were definitely not
I'd check again (they're still largely html5).
>but that's not what I was referring to and the physics are wrong on iOS too.
Right, but that's because they're completely hijacking the scroll behavior to be able to do the "fancy" inertial and bounce scrolling...
I like how you two make claims with no data to back them up. You both don't know how "native" or how "html5" the app is.
Gmail, Google+ are both HTML wrappers on iOS. I'm not sure what to tell you, those are well known facts, easily confirmed with half an ounce of Googling.
http://engineering.tumblr.com/post/35271768127/tumblr-for-ip...
Of course, HTML5 proponents will continue to ignore these major data points.
From the article:
"In the native app, scrolling doesn't stop for about 3s. We decided to increase friction and reduce the animation duration to 1.4s. This not only makes content ready to read faster, it also provides extra idle time for the app to buffer more items while the user is still reading existing content."
Natively built apps are almost always "better" because they're closer to the OS and implement the native UI conventions. At the same time, web apps are almost always cheaper, because you don't have to develop for each platform from scratch (or suffer a lowest common denominator experience by using a cross-platform non-web dev framework.)
Mobile has the same dynamic. Mobile web apps can get away with being worse, as long as they are "good enough" and available on all platforms. The app store's ease-of-shipping bonus has delayed this, but the shift to mobile web apps is pretty much inevitable because of the cost of development and the ease of deployment.
It needs to meet the needs of the user, that's all.
And if that can be done with X-platform HTML5 then that might be the advantage the developer is looking for.
I wish most developers would turn to HTML5 today, like right now, and avoid native apps at all cost unless there is really no alternative.
Why?
Because I remember the browser wars and how much it was a terrible idea and the terrible experience it made for users who simply could not experience the internet from a single starting point. This time it's not simply a matter of downloading another browser, if there's content I want to consume and there's not a native app for my phone, what do I do? I buy a different one? What about the content that I already consume and that's not over there? Should I have multiple phones?
I could not care less if it's optimize to integrated well with the native environment or some whatnot, let the browser handle that with default behavior. I want the content, the feature, and not wait for companies to port over apps from one place to the next.
This platform cult is pretty meaningless to me, in fact I don't even want to buy any device right now because I'm pretty sure I'll get burned as a user either way. The only platform I'm betting my money on as a user is the upcoming Firefox OS. Hopefuly Mozilla will be able to undo the damage done in this fragmented mess, again.
There's many sites that I consciously avoid on my phone because they work so poorly that I don't even want to bother. These sites do mobile users no service by existing. An app or website has to at least meet the "user will tolerate it" bar.
There's also the not insignificant problem of app security. Not so long ago there was a news item about the FB native app accessing contacts and uploading them to FB servers. The web app cannot do that, and that's a Good Thing.
There's also another reason why HTML5 apps are better than native: they are composable. There isn't much out there other than search engines that takes advantage of this fact, but webapps can be composed, parsed, and otherwise uniformly manipulated in useful and interesting ways. Android and iOS do indeed offer some integration points for their native apps, but nowhere near at the level that the web allows today.
While you identified the problem, the solution is a truly open mobile OS, not webapps.
Tools matter even for content delivery! Hulu recently migrated their PS3 app from native to something that's apparently based on web technologies, and the experience became much worse in almost every way: slower loading, laggy scrolling, more confusing interface. Hulu ships on many devices and I think they hope to share aspects of their front-end, but with their new app, watching TV became more difficult and less pleasant.
I don't believe you when you claim to not care, that you would rather live on the lowest common denominator in perpetuity than be faced with a transient zero.
I do hope this app silences the HTML5 critics out there who say you can't get a good UX with HTML5, though. The proof is in the pudding.
I believe you're wrong. The question isn't whether HTML can keep up with what exists today but what is offered in the future natively.
We are already living in a world with data caps and it will be so for the foreseeable future. That alone hinders the capabilities of the web. We're not even including the distrust that consumers have for paying for something unless it is through a system owned by Apple, Amazon, Google and MS. This is even including Gen Y users.
I have no doubt that the web is the future but the future is a ways off. There are just too many obstacles that are in the way currently.
That said, web gaming right now isn't good. But if WebGL becomes popular then there's no reason for it not to become a perfectly usable platform.
If the business model failed that isn't a point against the technology which worked very well.
> HTML5 allows you to cache apps and data locally
Native is just much much simpler to develop and more performant to run. Yes, you loose the cross-platorm appeal, but which will appeal more to your potential user: an app crafted to run on a few platforms (and therefore alien on all of them), or an app crafted with a specific platform in mind? Not many predict that desktop apps will be replaced by web apps soon, but for some reason this a popular view regarding mobile. But it is backwards: on desktop you have much more room to manoeuvre.
I think it is more likely we will see the web going a bit back to its roots with a more pronounced cloud-web gaining prominence, basically backend servers talking to apps (and browsers) API calls and JSON exchange.
Shamantic dance? It's trivial to the point of being a non-factor. You wrap your app in Phonegap, and make json requests to the web if you need data from there. Otherwise, it is stored and runs on the client.
> Not many predict that desktop apps will be replaced by web apps soon, but for some reason this a popular view regarding mobile.
For most things, desktop apps were replaced by web apps. Which is why Facebook doesn't maintain a desktop app (or Hacker News for that matter). HTML5 proponents have never made the claim that it will replace all native apps. Instead, it will replace data/list style apps like Facebook or productivity apps, which frankly, make up the vast majority of apps in the app store.
> You wrap your app in Phonegap, and make json requests to
> the web if you need data from there.
> For most things, desktop apps were replaced by web apps
> Instead, it will replace data/list style apps
I'm not going to touch the rest of your comments but mutability of presentation is really not the place to wage your battle against HTML/CSS/JS from. Dynamic presentation is really web tech's strong point.
There's a trade-off, though: a hybrid app is a lot more work, but in return you generally get much shorter dev times when creating new content. It's not always the right design decision to make, but there are use cases where it's worth the investment.
Also, FB is an online community so there is no way to get content, whether native or HTML5 without data plans on your phone. While the native app will be able to cache some content, FB will never make it large enough because they want to get site traffic (and hence ads)
- The project took 2 months for me to learn the sencha framework AND to build the app from scratch (it's live in the app store).
- The app performs well on the iphone 4, but the best performance is on the iphone 4S and later.
- The Android version is not as smooth. It's significantly slower. This means it's not truly cross-platform.
- People with the iphone 4S / 5 don't know it's not a native app until I tell them.In the meantime all those native developers will be kicking your ass in earnings and functionality.
There's no need to get testy. There's no reason why HTML5 proponents can't implement some or even all of their apps in Native code (as I do). Without getting into a religious war, though, it's important to understand where the puck is going in addition to where it is currently.
And let's not forget that OS fragmentation affects Native developers just like it does HTML5 developers (especially on Android).
A more apples-to-apples comparison would be to put it in a iOS app running UIWebView and see if the performance is maintained. I'd certainly be interested in the results.
I suspect the latter may change, but I wouldn't count on the former.
- they use a proxy to cut down data transfer
Good choice, but comparing it with the orignal app is not valid anymore (its not really html5 that is making it faster)
Anyway its still a very fast mobile app, and html5 is sometimes the best choice to make.
Because it is very expensive to write a different app for all platforms currently. However, currently, it is also very time consuming to have a html5 app that is on-par with native, and works well in both android and iphone.
So its a tradeoff really, html5 is not better than native, or vice versa.
Like so many things in life, it depends :-)
Facebook could have done the same thing with their app too, so I don't see how this affects validity.
By the way, the download time for the native app is also non-zero. With appcache you pay the framework's download cost only once. Admittedly it still needs parsing to load, but i haven't had this seconds-long parsing experience myself in my sencha touch app.
Both Ext and Sencha Touch are very monolithic. When you use Sencha Command to pair your app down to just what it uses, it still pulls in well over 90% of the framework.
Also, if you are doing a bunch of optimizations to make it fast on HTML5, then you're basically doing the same work as writing a native app, so what are you gaining by doing a HTML5?
Seriously, at some point you can get a better user experience, have better access to native API's and can really leverage the full abilities of the device by going native. So, you know, go native.
Disclaimer: I have wrote HTML5 mobile apps and I think it's a great developer experience, but it feels worse as a user.
It's also a bit disingenuous to say you are forced to optimize every HTML5 app. The whole point of Sencha's blog post is to advertise the fact that they've abstracted away all those optimizations you need to do so that developers can focus on building cross platform HTML5 mobile apps.
Cross-Platform Developer Tools 2012 | VisionMobile http://www.visionmobile.com/product/cross-platform-developer... > the landscape of 100+ cross-platform developer tools
Actually this is a big reason I dislike HTML5 (or I think HTML5 is wrong). Developers don't have freedom on languages and APIs. There are no healthy competition.
And don't forget that web browser itself is a multi-platform application. You can use Chrome and Firefox on Windows/Mac/iOS/Android. These are written in a "cross-platform language" C++.
In addition, most video games are written in C++ so many games are released on multi platforms (Xbox360/PS3/PC/iOS/Android). I suspect most web developers don't even know this...
Nobody here, as far as I could tell, was suggesting that.
> In addition, most video games are written in C++ so many games are released on multi platforms (Xbox360/PS3/PC/iOS/Android). I suspect most web developers don't even know this...
But wait, aren't iOS apps written in Objective-C using Cocoa Touch and Android apps written in Java? I don't think you can simply write your app in C++ and call it cross platform.
> Actually this is a big reason I dislike HTML5 (or I think HTML5 is wrong). Developers don't have freedom on languages and APIs. There are no healthy competition.
I've honestly never heard lack of freedom as an argument against HTML5. This argument is strange. How is iOS any more "free" than the web?
This is very increasingly untrue.
>, if you are doing a bunch of optimizations to make it fast on HTML5, then you're basically doing the same work as writing a native app
This has never, ever been true for me, not even counting the fact that I don't have to make 3-4x the number of native apps, especially given BB10 coming out next year.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
Where do I actually find compelling mobile web app user experience when I am trying to solve a problem in my web browser as a user when I search using a search engine?
I noticed a few years ago that Google cut out their mobile only results option - and now when you search for anything on a smart phone you get a mish mash of mobile friendly and conventional web optimised results. For a little while there Google would put a little mobile icon next to mobile optimized results - but that has gone too. I know perhaps the point of mobile is moot now - since we have a sizeable amount of tablets accessing websites too. But just in my own personal research all my friends who aren't techy say they much prefer sites that look right on their 'touch' (be it mobile or tablet). For instance, is there even such a thing as a 'mobile web app store' out there?
If consumers had an easier way of finding great mobile web apps perhaps this would grow this channel? I'd be interested in perspectives on this - maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way.
I'd also like to make the case that I think HTML5 will continue to make a very important contribution moving forward - why? Because as we get more devices, it's really starting to get silly how many apps I constantly need updated and feel like I need syncing. I think as prices come down we will find ourselves with several devices for home, out and about and at work - using the 'fat client' model of installing all these apps just gets annoying.
Truth is - HTML5 apps can be made to perform well but there are limits. Battery life suffers and you may find in future that the cool animation/whatever you wanted to add in is too laggy (especially on older devices).
Really? If anything I would have thought that HTML5 was more battery efficient- there's only so much you can do with it, after all.
I spent a long time optimising a mobile webapp I was working on and while it was 95% there, that last 5% bugged me to no end. So I investigated native options. But I learnt to avoid mixing CSS3 box-shadows with transition animations and that sort of thing- you definitely suffer in FPS.
I wished jQuery Mobile has Infinite List Component that handles the list item recycling the last time I used it. It is the equivalent of UITableViewCell's dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier.
I agree with you. I was going to ask this same questoin. From TFA, they stated above. Well, that really sounds like Mark Zuckerberg didn't know what he was talking about at the beginning of this year!
A lot of people are still on Android 2.X as you have stated, and a lot of people are on slow Android devices. I know several people on ZTE Blades running 2.3 which were available over a year ago for less than £100. Sure, not the snappiest of devices, but usable. What is the HTML5 version going to be like for these users?
Blah blah blah, hardware limitations, you can't limit yourself to lowest denominator etc. But Facebook HAS to support all these users. And it's not just users in the western world. There are millions of users in third world countries who pretty much exclusively access Facebook from mobile phones, usually not the latest spec (or even close) or most up to date s/w version (I doubt many would even know how to update it).
I agree that web apps are the way to go. But it is VERY much going to depend on your target audience.
Do the new native FB apps only run on iOS5+ and Android 4.1+? HTML5 may be ready on those platforms, but Android still has a lot of 2.x phones floating around. How do the HTML 5 benchmarks for iOS 5 run on the original iPhone 4?
http://jairaj.org/2012/08/27/facebook-for-ios.html
Although I have to admit that Sencha's implementation isn't all that great. If you're going to offer an alternative, at least make it better than the other option.
I think its very possible to imagine a world where HTML5 can be just as good as native. It comes down to two things:
1) HTML5 needs more JavaScript APIs to access hardware like camera, contacts, etc. It's is not very difficult to imagine HTML6 (if you will) supporting this in much the same way that it supports geolocation today.
2) Improved JavaScript performance. It's common knowledge that the embedded web views on iOS are much less capable than Safari. There's no reason to think this would continue forever. Furthermore, better JavaScript performance makes things like image progressing, music recognition possible.
Right now, you are absolutely correct that HTML5 is not as capable as native. No argument there. But, this gap narrows as time goes on. I firmly believe the opposite of you; we will eventually see a time when web-based applications rival native apps in terms of power and functionality. You can already do some awesome image processing stuff using canvas and JavaScript.
This is only the beginning...
It's already becoming easier to build interactive rich applications with web technologies. Frankly, most people aren't paying enough attention.
Sorry for my English
They make building HTML apps much, much, much more similar to building native applications.