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Comment by barista | Hacker News Reader

The experience you can provide with an HTML5 app are many times subpar as compared to a native app. Note how facebook abandoned their HTML5 app and went native.

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YouTube's API only requires the video player itself to be in HTML5, the rest of the app can be native or whatever the hell you want. The engineering work here is youtube hands you an HTML snippet (specifically an <iframe>), and you plop that into a UIWebView where you want the inline video to be and you're done.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference

The issue then is that Google will complain that the rest of the app doesn't adhere to all of Google's terms of services regarding displaying of ads, which are difficult to implement without their blessing.

There is no such ToS. Nor is there any "app must be HTML5" requirement.

What the hell does facebook's HTML 5 app have to do with the subject at hand? And how is HTML 5's experience subpar for a video app like youtube?

Calm down. So you think a youtube app with a big rectangle that plays video and another one that allows you to type the url is the right experience? Video playback is just one aspect of it. search, lists, subscriptions, commenting, uploading, tagging, etc.

As for facebook's app, I was commenting about HTML5 still not being the best option for mobile app development.

LinkedIn also abandoned their HTML 5 mobile app experiences.

the biggest problem with HTML 5 video is that it does not support adaptive bitrate streaming. notice that the desktop experience of YouTube still uses a flash player instead of an HTML 5 video player. notice that apple used QuickTime as their default player on their site.

in short, HTML 5 video player is an absolute last resort player.

  > notice that the desktop experience of YouTube still uses
  > a flash player instead of an HTML 5 video player

YouTube uses HTML5 on my machines, since I don't have Flash installed. It works fine.

Don't get me started on how terrible all of it is on Linux. Incapable of dual screen full screen in flash, HTML5 has to buffer every time you enter full screen mode.

Incredible slow performance, buggy, crashes. I actually have to boot into Windows VM just to watch flash/youtube.

Also note how sencha then went and re-created the new facebook app in html, showing that facebook was full of shit.

For one, Sencha's app doesn't allow commenting. For two, it doesn't support notifications, so "re-created" is a generous verb there.

Ah yes, comments. One of the hardest things to get right in HTML5. I have never seen it done well, you absolutely need native for that.

Sencha's app was a proof-of-concept. Their motivation was to show how and where facebook was "full-of-shit" which they did beautifully. If you read their respective articles, you can discern for yourself.

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