Mobile Development: Native vs. Web

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The balance is shifting, what was once impossible using WAP-only cellphone technology is now possible with the new breed of smart-phones supporting the latest HTML 5 technologies. But all is not where it should be... yet. Good news first, bad news second. (And Apple, if you'd like to fix the bad news in the iPhone 3.1 update, that would be great, thanks in advance!)

New reasons to be optimistic with web-based mobile application development:
  1. Freedom to Draw: the newly supported canvas element
  2. Freedom to Remember: local sqlite DB support now an official standard
  3. Freedom to Know Where (location): HTML5 JavaScript location support moving from the early-access Geode plugin to common usage
  4. Freedom to Animate Smoothly: 2d and 3d accelerated drawing support moves towards a standard
  5. Freedom to Iterate Instantly: server-hosted JavaScript code (ok this is an old one, but the App Store approval cycle highlights it)
  6. Freedom to Load Rapidly: application caching controls and widespread 3G support
  7. Freedom to prototype fast: Growing support of iPhone and Palm Pre with toolkits like YUI.
My continuing reasons to be pessimistic on web-based mobile application development: Much of what O’Reilly touts as “Web Squared” (The sensor-enabled web) is still off-limits.
  1. Inability to See photos/video: photo-upload and camera access blocked
  2. Inability to Hear Audio: audio-upload and microphone access blocked
  3. Inability to Feel: No accelerometer access
  4. Inability to Stay On: No “never lock the phone” and no background process support on iPhone
  5. Inability to Keep Updated: No web-based Push notification support beyond AJAX.
  6. Inability to Integrate: No access to the device’s Calendar or Contact-list
  7. Inability to Communicate: No P2P support (bluetooth or network)
All in all, doing much better, but still has a long way to go before a level playing field with native apps.

...anything that you’d like to add to either column?

Originally Posted: July 20th, 2009

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