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Comment by egfx | Hacker News Reader

Actually most are making native mobile apps. I'm a mobile guy making a cross compatible web app. Why anyone would make a native app in our world of ECMAScript6 and HTML5 is beyond me.

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Having sane tools, languages and adequate performance maybe. :)

The web will eat up everything, watch.

"Will" is not the same as "already has."

There are many reasons to build native apps in the enterprise IT (business software) world. For certain use cases, access to offline data and fast performance become critical requirements.

Think of a traveling sales rep who is on the road and needs access to a product catalog and pricing information to take sales orders. HTML5 doesn't quite cut it in such a scenario.

clearly you haven't seen Breeze http://www.getbreezenow.com/

I've not worked with Breeze but have seen a couple of other HTML5-based frameworks that promise "native-like" capabilities. For the data-heavy enterprise world, none of them have worked.

I have used Breeze and it works beautifully. It is a bit complex but the results give you a very native like experience.

Ward Bell talks about it briefly here: http://www.viddler.com/v/94a02c0f

There are a few google talks about it on youtube too if you look. It's great for enterprise.

The fact that you even have to use phrases like "a very native like experience" should be enough to show you that JS+HTML5 is not yet enough.

Why couldn't this sales rep use a mobile connected ipad to access a web app with pricing and ordering?

In several industries, sales reps often travel to locations without internet access (such as factory shop-floors, construction sites, mining sites etc). In such cases, the rep simply has to fire up the product catalog, capture orders, take notes etc and then sync up when he returns to an office/hotel room.

This is in fact one of the most common reasons for companies to look for native apps.

You can use PhoneGap or similar libraries however to write the app in HTML5 so you can have a mobile app and an online version for minimal effort.

you can use local storage or a number of other workarounds to solve this problem.

Where do you get the statistic that "most" HN folks are making native mobile apps? Are you sure it's not server-side software, or machine-independent code, or something else?

i.e. [citation needed]

Also, the reasons people make native mobile apps rather than hybrid apps (which run inside a mobile web-player component) are speed and reliability. Famously, Facebook switched from HTML5 to native for their iOS app:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

Maybe less so the case with HN but certainly the case. Just look at Product Hunt where nearly half of today's posts are mobile native apps. Facebook has since built and released React. I'm willing to bet Facebook will switch away from native again.

Facebook is building something they call React Native, which, as I understand it, lets you code an app using JavaScript and web stuff, but then it transforms all of that into native code that gets compiled to run on the various mobile operating systems. I think it's currently iOS-only. Facebook says they're already using it for multiple production apps, but I don't know which ones.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

Because your web app will appear sluggish to your users compared to a native app.

http://blogs.telerik.com/appbuilder/posts/13-11-21/what-exac...

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