Mobile Application Development: Web vs. Native

A few short years ago, most mobile devices were, for want of a better word, "dumb." Sure, there were some early smartphones, but they were either entirely e-mail focused or lacked sophisticated touch screens that could be used without a stylus. Even fewer shipped with a decent mobile browser capable of displaying anything more than simple text, links, and maybe an image. This meant if you had one of these devices, you were either a businessperson addicted to e-mail or an alpha geek hoping that this would be the year of the smartphone. Then Apple changed everything with the release of the iPhone, and our expectations for mobile experiences were completely reset.

The original plan for third-party iPhone apps was to use open Web technology. Apple even released tooling for this in its Dashcode project.⁴ Fast-forward three years and native apps are all the rage, and—usually for performance reasons—the mobile Web is being unfavorably compared.

There are two problems with this line of thinking. First, building a different app for each platform is very expensive if written in each native language. An indie game developer or startup may be able to support just one device, likely the iPhone, but an IT department will have to support the devices that its users have that may not always be the latest and greatest. Second, the performance argument that native apps are faster may apply to 3D games or image-processing apps, but there is a negligible or unnoticeable performance penalty in a well-built business application using Web technology.


http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1968203