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Comment by micampe | Hacker News Reader

Why do we see plenty of articles saying that HTML5 can be as good or better than native code and no actual applications doing it?

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.

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Add Tumblr to that list as well. They recently converted their iOS app from essentially pure HTML5 to pure native, which was no easy feat considering the dynamic nature of blog posts on Tumblr, which can contain almost arbitrary HTML content.

http://engineering.tumblr.com/post/35271768127/tumblr-for-ip...

Of course, HTML5 proponents will continue to ignore these major data points.

We've yet to see a web app that meets or exceeds the experience offered by native desktop apps.

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.

Why would a HTML5 app need to exceed the experience of a native app ?

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 think it's a mix of FUD and reality. It's true that for most older devices HTML5 apps just don't perform very well, but they are slowly disappearing from the market.

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.

>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.

I've never actually been able to get a confirmation one way or the other oh which of Google's native apps are "hybrid" apps and just how much of those apps is done in HTML5. The previous version of their gmail app seemed to employ a lot of HTML5 because you could see the main inbox list re-render occasionally. That app performed perfectly well for me. Unless we hear from Google officially about the new app we'll never know. It could be that it's full native, or it could be that they've perfected the HTML5 code to make it feel completely native. Who knows.

I assume the current Gmail is mostly written in native code because it is faster and there are elements in it that don't exist on the web site.

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.

It's certainly not fully native. It has a number of issues that make it a poor experience in my opinion.

- 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.

Everyone hated it.

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.

The ratings were particularly low before it went native. I know because I have a Gmail account in Mail.app and didn't use it because of this.

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.

Ratings are far from a scientific way of deducing an app's value.

Strawman. They may not be scientific (statistics is a science, btw), but they are one way we have to infer whether people hate an app or not, which was the topic of this branch of the conversation.

I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users didn't find it at all. You have to be fairly adventurous to even try a different mail client than the default Apple app.

I believe the scrolling physics can be updated. In the Bonus Points section they mention:

> 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.

Because end users couldn't care less if an app is build using native sdk or web technology; is it multi-platform or not. All they care is how it works. As for developers: some only know web tech and are not willing to learn native—their loss. Some buy an idea of developing universal web-tech based app for two or three platforms will save them time. I doubt that very much. Either you get a crappy app on all platforms, or you spend more time polishing it than it would take to go native for all platforms from the very beginning.

>> One I think is a big reason is clearly visible in the video: scrolling physics are different.

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."

> "no actual applications doing it?"

hahahaha

Google has failed miserably? You might want to tell them that. I'm pretty sure their iOS dept will be shocked to hear that.

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.

Why so angry?

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.

I'm not angry, you're just confused.

>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'd check again (they're still largely html5).

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.

Haha. Jesus this whole thread was a disaster I should've stayed away from. It's a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about spewing years old tropes about HTML that aren't even true.

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.

You keep being needlessly harsh and bitter, that’s not exactly something that invites me to continue a conversation.

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