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by ghostnappa 4880 days ago
Something about the entire basis of this article urks me. Maybe it is from me starting into mobile development, but in the end or near future, it is to mobile's benefit that applications are platform agnostic and live on the web. There will be circumstances where native development is beneficial, but there will come the time where the facebook app or the cnn app should no longer be relevant. So I'm not sure why in the long term this even matters, the only necessity is that the production is scaled to where they don't lose money. At the same time, I'm probably making this argument more for Ubuntu for phones than anything else.
2 comments
bithive123 4880 days ago
How long have you been doing web development? These things are cyclical. Back when Flash was FutureSplash, HTML seemed decrepit until eventually it became clear that HTML5 and JavaScript would take over the space. Then just as HTML5 was finished hiding Flash's body, native mobile apps (replete with "web views") started pushing the pendulum in the other direction. Whether we'll see the "mobilization" of the desktop OS or the "webification" of the apps still remains to be seen. Either way, "the cloud" is here to stay.
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wsc981 4880 days ago
-- "Maybe it is from me starting into mobile development, but in the end or near future, it is to mobile's benefit that applications are platform agnostic and live on the web."

I don't see this happen, at least not in the nearby future and maybe even never. The point is that people want a native experience and likely the web will never be able to give such an experience. I think webapps will always be something comparable to Java apps a few years ago, i.e. work on every operating system and try to integrate the look & feel, but not 100% "get it".

For our start-up we would like to share a big part of the codebase between platforms though, so this year we'll be looking towards replacing our existing codebase with a Mono (C# / .NET) codebase. At least with this solution we should be able to:

a) give users of our apps a native experience.

b) share a big part of our code between Android & iOS apps.

c) be able to expand easier to Windows Phone if the users of this platform increase and we think it's viable or if there's a demand from our clients to move our platform to Windows Phone.

Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user and I've always hated apps that didn't feel 100% native on my preferred platform. Perhaps to me the experience can be explained as a sort of "uncanny valley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

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