[ivanzhao]

For my upcoming game/app (threewiki.com) I actually built all three versions : )

First the complete, native iPhone version, then realizing that parsing HTML and storing with Cocoa is a pain. (Core Data is pretty good but too bureaucratic for simple things).

So in my second version, I moved all the data logics to an App Engine server, and just leave the app with a thin UIWebView layer in most cases, and only stores the user token on the phone. Mobile Webkit is pretty accurate but I didn't like how the animation turns out, just doesn't "feel" right. Besides, scrolling is much slower in UIWebView than the native UITableView, and you cannot change the tap-link style in UIWebView except a simple color overlay.

Then comes my final version, in which I use UIWebView for static content, and use UITableView & custom views/animation when there's interaction, and all model logics and data processing done on the server.

The app feels super smooth now. And it would be super easy to update because pretty much all the logics in on the server, so app is essentially a pretty "portal". Take a look of the video if you are interested threewiki.com