Discovery, usage, and feedback are all more polished in native apps rather than ...

smacktoward · on April 7, 2014

> Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins

HTML5 offline storage should let a mobile-oriented site store a fair bit of data offline, to avoid having to go out and fetch everything anew all the time. It's just that few web developers design that way b/c we've all been spoiled by desktop users' broadband connections.

> Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins

My Galaxy S3 lets me set bookmarks for sites on the home screen (and anywhere else in the launcher I would wish to).

> Ease of discovery? Native wins

Slogging through ten million clones in an app store counts as easy discovery? OK.

> Ideal user experience? Native wins

I'm not sure about that. We heard the same noise during the 2000s about how users were going to prefer "rich client" apps to in-browser apps, because the rich client apps would be able to respect their platform's native look and feel. And then it turned out that "I can access it from anywhere without installing anything" was something they cared about a lot more.

orky56 · on April 7, 2014

Those are all very fair points. Although devs and tech consumers may be able to accomplish these things, the typical consumer doesn't understand or care about these things. Dixon's article was focusing more on the end user side of things and it's very clear what the demand is.

carsonreinke · on April 7, 2014

However, most people have their phones on them everywhere, so no need to worry about the "anywhere".

Joeri · on April 7, 2014

I built a mobile web app that leveraged html 5 app cache so you could use it offline, and used metadata so that when put on the home screen it had a proper icon and when launched there was no browser chrome (on ios). It worked fine, and yet the guy who took over development ended up wrapping it. It made it easier to sell.