On Jun 15, 3:22 pm, zero_star <[email protected]> wrote: > According to all reports from the recent Google IO event, Google now > actively advocates HTML5 Standards, and rightly so, since for us > developers there is no better and more easily portable platform to > develop for mobile devices. However, despite that, Android does not > have a notion of 'first class' web applications.
That must be years away, and I'm not looking at the technical availability of optimized browsers that incorporate Gears, HTML5 and other features that are ahead. Even with optimizations towards JS encoding and execution or the goodness of HTML 5, mobile web apps are at a disadvantage over native apps. There's a variety of reasons that I can see: - Native apps can be optimized to just sip data via JSON or XML, while encoded JS and HTML will always come with a overhead penalty. That shows, in particular, well ironically, in mobile use with spotty coverage and capacity. In addition, native apps have all execution code available a priori, which, sans caveats, allows the management of the user experience when connectivity is poor. I suppose we shall see how caching and code splitting will work out... it sure is a burden on the dev team, because it adds a layer of complexity. In the extreme, your dev team might end up succumbing to the challenges of code management, having to start over by developing native apps for the various platforms of interest after all. - There's issues that flat out don't exist in the wired web. In most cases you can optimize a native app to live comfortably on Edge or even GPRS. These old dogs just happen to continue to be operated on frequency bands that have better signal penetration than 3G. Which means, on Edge, users of your optimized native app can actually interact with your product in a meaningful way, while mobile web app users leave the room to hunt for 3G, or switch to WiFi (What was the SSID again?). That gets old real fast. To aggravate the issue - wireless broadband requires a solid build out of the fixed side infrastructure by the carrier. A lot of ground capacity is needed to deliver that broadband experience, and that may or not be the case in the area where your users live for the carriers that they chose. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
