The ongoing success of native mobile application has fueled a passionate debate across our industry. Google's DeWitt Clinton explains:
Native mobile apps today feel better, run faster, are easier to monetize, and are more convenient to find than mobile web apps.
But that's a bug, not a feature. This model didn't survive on the desktop, and there is absolutely no reason to think it will in mobile, either.
His post was a response to GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham interview of Josh Williams, Gowalla CEO, who explained:
Gowalla had built both an iPhone app and a “beautiful mobile site” for other smartphone platforms, but people overwhelmingly used the app ... it drives a stake in the heart of the build-once-deploy-everywhere model, and makes the market really fragmented.
Stacey sees a broader trend:
It’s also an indication of the wholesale shift in how people use the Internet and the nature of the Internet.
DeWitt continues:
now it seems laughable that [in the late 90s] people didn't see clearly the upcoming dominance of webapps over native apps on the desktop: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay, Gmail, MySpace, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Blogger, Wordpress, etc., etc., etc.
What native app do you use the most on your OSX or Windows machine? My money says it is Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, or Safari.
it's still far, far easier to build a browser-based app and reach hundreds of millions of people than it is to build multiple native desktop apps for the same audience.
Stacey notes that native applications have succeeded at building a business model where the Web has had some difficulty to monetize content and applications:
apps are [not only] popular, but [...] folks can charge for apps while still unable to monetize their web-based services.
Even DeWitt concedes:
The mobile web browsers and mobile web toolkits of today just haven't quite caught up yet with the native environments.
But things are changing quickly:
- jQuery team recently announced the jQuery Mobile Framework (jquerymobile.com)
- GWT Mobile Webkit (code.google.com/p/gwt-mobile-webkit), which offers a library to "leverage HTML5 and Mobile WebKit features"
- the mobile browsers are advancing quickly as well, with Opera and Firefox leading the way
DeWitt concludes:
there is no technical reason that mobile web apps won't catch up.
Not surprisingly, DeWitt's post generated a lot of comments. Anssi Porttikivi adds:
You cannot bookmark a UI state in a native app and share it to Facebook and others. You can not open several UI sessions like you can open several browser pages to same site. You cannot copy and paste at will, only input widget text. You can not search on a page. Whatever betterments the browser gets, the native apps don't, at least for free, for all, and in a consistent way. That was just a few reasons to like Web apps.
Denton Gentry noted:
I like the responsiveness and polish of a local app, but I want it to store (or sync) its data to the cloud. Never lose data.
Doug Purdy suggested:
One of the key factors at play between native and Web platforms is access to new hardware capabilities.
JR Holmes added:
People are not favoring web applications because they view the web as a source of content rather than as a tool for accomplishing a task. The relationship and functions there are quite different.
[Hence] it is little surprise that a web browser is the most popular and common program that people use. They spend most of their time consuming content in one way or another. In that sense, Gmail isn't a web app, but a way of viewing the email content.
Is there an inherent advantage to Native Applications as new computing devices continue to emerge packed with sensors and taking advantage of an ubiquitous high(er) bandwidth connectivity (3G, 4G)? Is it the business model which finally allows the creativity of long-tail developers express itself? will history repeat itself and impose new Web standards? Or are we entering a new era in the architecture of (composite) applications driven by user experience? What is your perspective on the question?