Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by potatolicious 5532 days ago
Because it will never end. Today it's camera, accelerometer, compass, and voice commands... tomorrow it'll be something else.

Right now, since apps are predominantly native, a vendor can add new hardware and capabilities to their devices without the prior blessing of a standards body. Standards bodies will always be several years behind the state of the art in features, which means anything really compelling and new will always be in native form.
1 comments
ignifero 5532 days ago
Well, geolocation didn't take long to incorporate, hopefully the rest will follow.
link
potatolicious 5532 days ago
Didn't take long to incorporate into the spec (even then, it's practically light speed by W3C standards, and a tortoise crawl by native standards)... but support in the wild is still pretty pathetic.

As long as IE lives, web standards will move at a snail's pace. I'd say we're >5 years (probably more!) out from being able to, in general, expect something like geolocation to be supported in your average user.

If you want to move faster than the competition and give more hardware/features to your users, you're still going native.

link
ignifero 5532 days ago
it works decently on webkit browsers (and palm os i think, and nokia). The thing is there should be at least drafts for camera or voice support in webkit, simply because there is a need for it (Or else there wouldn't be projects like phonegap or titanium). With the proliferation of tablets and more and more mobile devices, going native will soon be a sisyphean task.
link