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Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

As a dedicated untappd user (500 unique beers, way more checkins), what does beerquest offer over untappd? It looks beautiful; clearly a very well put together app, but is there a compelling reason to switch? Either way, great work!

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The biggest difference between the two apps is that BeerQuest is just as much about the place as it is about the beer. We don't rely on third party places data like Untappd does (Foursquare). Checkins are about checking into a place and not a beer. If you're at a place and are drinking a beer, you 'drink' a beer. We also think the journal and maps aspect of the app turned out really well. Quickly map out all of the great places near you and everywhere you been.

From a technical perspective, BeerQuest was built using Objective C instead of HTML5, so it feels like a true native app because it is.

Untappd has been native for quite awhile.

http://blog.untappd.com/post/10844733770/weve-gone-native

It's not native in the strict sense. They ported over their web app using PhoneGap: http://phonegap.com/app/untappd/

Untappd uses webviews to serve up local HTML/CSS/JS. To me, that's not native.

They stopped doing that. It's fully native now.

I don't think so. The showcase on PhoneGap was posted in July 2012. Additionally, it's easy to tell that the app isn't utilizing the Cocoa Touch UI framework. Look at how the views bounce, how the buttons "feel". Those are dead PhoneGap giveaways.

I've never heard this given as a reason to choose one app over another. Are many people fussy like that?

I've found that most people don't care about this unless you're delivering an extraordinary native experience (ala Path) A native app is great if you've got a team who can do it well. If you can't, simple PhoneGap-ish apps will suffice. It's a sunk cost in that if you get traction, you'll eventually need to switch over to native to compete: effectively a re-write.

You should embed a live demo of BeerQuest in your landing page using Kickfolio, so we can try it out before installing it.

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