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Comment by cpprototypes | Hacker News Reader

Competition is good but for app development it's becoming too much. Android and iOS and WP and maybe Firefox OS? Who can handle developing four versions of an app? There's been a lot of debate on native vs web based on performance. But web may become the only reasonable way to release an app on all platforms.

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It's probably not as big of a deal as you think. If you're piloting an app, you're probably going to stick to just Android for rapid development or perhaps iOS for the larger market share in certain categories. Eventually if you get big enough to justify supporting multiple platforms, you should be able to get enough staff to support them all individually.

If you're building for all platforms with no indication that your product is of high value, then this might be even beneficial for developer focus on finding product market fit.

Thus why cross-platform solutions are having tremendous growth. If web won't win out, it'll certainly be a cross-platform solution in the long run. My money's on web, if performance of those webviews catches up to native.

The performance of the web views doesn't have to catch up, it just needs to be adequate. Just like on the desktop browsers still deliver a much weaker experience than native apps, but almost nobody is releasing new desktop apps anymore.

Xamarin or competitors might be a good way to handle different platforms for your app.

If you're using a PaaS like Parse.com then the only thing you'll really be changing between devices is the frontend.

This should be true for ANY backend, as long as you don't use a data serialisation mechanism that is really specific to a given language.

real programmers do it natively. :) And if anyone wants an app written on all 3 platforms, feel free to message me.

What you want is to give the best user experience, not a generic webview or cross/plateform framework. And to get the best user experience one needs to go native period. There is no debate , web based app performances are low on anything more than a basic CRUD app...

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