Native vs Web. Part 0: +1 argument in favor of developing native mobile apps

One evening I wanted to write an article about developing applications for mobile devices, but then Ostap suffered ...

Just as cyborgs filled the entire planet at one time , now mobile devices flood our lives. And what does this mean for us, geeks? New opportunities are not even worth discussing - these are delicious fruits from a tree called “gadget”. And since there are fruits and crowds of sufferers, why not start growing them (I'm talking about fruits, only Apple can grow sufferers)? And he will grow bigger and tastier, who has a better tool. What are the approaches in the mobile application? At a minimum, you can use the old proven web platform and start writing mobile web applications, or master the young branch of development for iOS and Android. The choice is not simple, and the scales swayed extremely long in my head, until one significant argument fell to the side of developing applications for iOS (potentially and under Android), which will be discussed today. But first, a brief insight into technologies and their capabilities.

What we should master the tool?

At a minimum, you need to start somewhere. These can be either books or tutorials. In the field of mobile web applications, everything is simple: about JavaScript, a full-time adult (approx. For tankers: it appeared in 1995), his sister, CSS, and his older brother, HTML, born in 1991, wrote books on terabytes, and maybe more. In a word, the sphere is developed, there is a lot of ready-made material in it, as well as specialists (note of the author: and those who consider themselves as such), and the learning process should not cause any particular difficulties. Young fighters can start training on cats, developing ordinary desktop web applications, and then systematically switch to mobile platforms. The only thing that will change for you is that you will use jQuery Mobile with jQTouch intersperses instead of classic jQuery. In the appendage you will get the GEO-API, the device rotation events (alas, you will not be given full access to the gyroscopes and accelerometers, so you will not be able to write an analogue Multiponk ) and a rather poor multitouch. By the aforementioned “appendages”, by the way, the material will have to be collected online bit by bit, books or manuals in the style of “Writing a modern working mobile web application with support for GEO, Rotation and Multitouch” you most likely will not find (or was I looking bad?) .
')
Well, what about the native platforms? Because we are only interested in the market, then we turn our heads away from MeeGo, Symbian, RIM. And here we see a robot of four years old and a tasty apple, which was born a year earlier. From the good points it can be noted that over the years of its existence many fundamental publications have been written for both iOS and Android. Writing for Android is somewhat simpler: as the SDK language is Java, the fee for the Android Market is 25 raccoons one time, and the SDK is available for almost any sane OS. With iOS, things are somewhat more complicated, because there will be a lot of cash infusions: first you have to buy a Mac, after you get tired of messing with hackintoshs, then you put out about a hundred raccoons per developer account per year, without it, by the way, you will not have access to the full SDK documentation and video from WWDC (download from torrents?! - pip your karma). For all these money / time investments, you will receive full support for the GEO-API, a full-fledged gyroscope (or accelerometer), a microphone, a camera, access to a photo gallery, data storage, multitouch. The choice of buns is clearly richer than with web development.

Faster, higher, stronger

The devil is in the details. And in my mobile devices, in my opinion, the biggest devil is hidden in the speed of the application's response to user actions. And no browser can run faster than a native application. This may seem insignificant: the difference in response to the opening of the tab, or selecting a menu item can be calculated in milliseconds, but on mobile devices it will be smoother and faster for a dozen milliseconds, and this feeling will not leave you. Open m.youtube.com (and this is probably one of the best web applications for mobile devices) and walk around the site. Go to the categories tab, rotate your gadget. Now open the embedded YouTube app. And compare. The details are insignificant, but it is more pleasant to work with the native application than with the web version - smoothness and speed take their toll.

Graphic Design Standards

Perhaps, among the users, there are two categories of people: one shouts “We want freedom of expression in what we create”, and another category simply makes convenient applications designed in the same style. With such applications it is easier to understand, to understand how they work and what opportunities they provide. In web applications, a reign of colors and forms reigns supreme. Perhaps an unusual design is great, but to be appreciated by the user, he should work with him a little, and not close the tab with the words “I don’t understand why I need it?”. In native applications, the platform dictates the principles of design design - it is easier to make a classic design than to invent something of your own. The Web has always been distinguished by a variety of approaches to building a user interface.

Argument

“Gillette - we advertise machines, and we raise on the edges”. In addition to making money directly on mobile applications (uncle, buy an application for just 1 eternal and green!), App-markets themselves (AppStore, Android Market) are a terrific marketing tool! You can use the mobile application to sell your service.

Having made a mobile application for Android or iOS, you launch it into an existing distribution network for products in the FREE category. And just like in ordinary supermarkets, people who come for milk can pay attention to the novelty yogurt, and in the AppStore the person who came for a text editor may be interested in your “Notepad” application. But after all, you, as a developer of “notepad”, have a true goal of attracting users to your service and not letting elephants go hungry ;-)

Tablets and other mobile devices have become fashionable. People regularly search for new items in the AppStore and Android Market for their pocket little animals. The likelihood that they stumble upon your application is very high. And since it works fast, has canonical graphics and a simple control interface, the user will be able to understand it and become interested in it. Having seized his interest, you seize a potential customer of the services of your Internet service.

PS0: This is the first article in a series comparing the development of mobile native and web applications. Despite the fact that I was convinced (and I hope you too) of the dominance of the native platform, sometimes there are tasks for which the web is a quick and cheap solution that only requires you to take a couple of lines of text from the user and return the result (I give will of your imagination!).
PS1: An interesting fact. Earlier, Apple actively promoted Apple WebApps - a catalog of web applications for iOS. But apparently something went wrong and the catalogs stopped replenishing.
PS_the_last: two articles prompted me to work: once and twice .