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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to buy it, it's an undeniable reality. Yes, if you're an enterprise and you can afford to write native apps for all platforms, then that's the better choice. If you're a small startup or a single developer, writing the app 3 times is just not cost effective.

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Well then there are still a few options; 1) it's internal and you can force-feed it to your employees, then it might be ok 2) it's external and you're trying to get a lot of people to work with it outside your company.

In both cases I still think you are better/easier/happier/cheaper off building it once and in case 1) giving your employees tablets/phones with the target OS and in case 2) just waiting till you have enough critical mass to warrant writing a version for the next OS.

Not to mention that, in most cases we have made HTML5 'hybrid' apps, we noticed that it takes more time making it uniform and smooth across the plethora of (especially Android) devices than just writing 2 native versions. And the HTML5 version will just never work well on a large amount of 'Alibaba $50' Android devices which surprisingly many people have. Resulting in TONS of bad reviews (if public) and/or very frustrated people.

Depends on whether or not quality of the product is a factor in your cost calculations. It should be, and for many startups and solo developers, it absolutely is.

Most likely you never tried to do what you preach. You will end writing your app only a little bit faster (if you are lucky) and then three times more on debugging.

I have. I built an HTML5 hybrid mobile app for Android and iOS. It was about 90% JS/HTML/CSS and 10% native code. Worked very well for our purposes. You can judge for yourself, it's called Kona and in both major app stores.

Eh yeah. Exactly what I said then reading the Android reviews then? Works on some devices, terrible on most; getting that JS/HTML/CSS to work well on 'most Android devices' is infinitely more difficult than doing it native. Is that worth it? I still want to bet I could've written both apps native in a shorter time with much better results. You can take me up on that any time.

> 90% JS/HTML/CSS and 10% native code.

this was going to be my comment on the original comment: it's not like you have to do only HTML5 or only native, or so i'm given to understand... i'd be interested to hear more about the hybrid approach if anyone has links/blog posts.

10/90 is Phonegap/Cordova; when hybrid is viable (imho) is when you need to show complex documents; what HTML was made for. So the parts in your native app where you need to show documents with nice flowing text, images, charts, etc HTML is a good option, but then the 10/90 is usually not native/html, but the other way around.

Pick a platform, port later if needed. It's what most indie app developers do.

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