Juri StrumpflohnerFollowJuri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, speaks at conferences and holds training workshops. Juri is also a recognized Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies
HTML5 vs Android: Apps or Web for mobile development??
2 min read
This is a hotly discussed topic recently. The web is now a fully-capable platform and it's getting better and better
as the HTML5 standard advances. And that's actually also the point why we're even here to discuss topics like this.
QCon London this year clearly showed the trend which is going into the HTML5 + JavaScript direction rather than for
native.
If it's for me personally, then I'd say you "go and develop a fancy nice Android app".
Why? Because you have its full power at hand, a market where to deploy it and hence a nice potential audience
which is going to consume it. That's the point! Your range of target consumers. I'm saying this, though, because I'm
and Android fanboy, I know how to develop Android apps and I love to develop for it!
But if you're in the
industry, more specifically, in the web industry, things change immediately. A major fact there are the
human resources and the required knowledge you have to deal with/acquire. That's exactly the scenario
where I'm currently in. As an architect in a web development company, I cannot just say "come on, lets open another
development branch, hire good mobile devs or train existing ones". Well, I could, but it wouldn't be the most
economic way of doing things. Instead, what you aim to do is to reuse existing resources, in the form of
knowledge and devs as much as you can. Because in the end, (at least for now) 80-90% of our focus will still
be the web platform, but we have to be ready also for the remaining 10-20% allocated to the mobile part.
And the latter one is growing enormously fast.
I predict that this year Apple will announce a new programming model for iOS which will be based on
Javascript.
IMHO that would be great. Consider how many more people would start developing for iOS if they would be
granted to develop in a language they know (JavaScript and HTML5) and to publish their "web" mobile apps on the
official market.
(More to come possibly on this topic on my blog here)
