Hybrid Applications

Hybrid (Native + web) And Ease of Cross-platform portability

We believe that,

-> Apps and HTML5 are the future of the digital universe.

-> Apps are a journey, not a destination, and a life cycle mindset is required.

-> HTML5 is fundamentally transforming how apps are created.

All hybrid apps are developed with cross-platform HTML5 and wrapped in a native container. This wrapper also gives these apps access to native capabilities like the camera, microphone, contact list, or notification system

Case Studies

-> Netflix has been on this same path, having made their shift to HTML5 for creating native app UI well over a year ago. They have shipped HTML5-based hybrid apps across many mobile device platforms, smart TVs, gaming devices, and other consumer electronics platforms. They have also been evangelizing this new approach with real conviction, giving speeches and posting detailed documents that describe the theory and implementation of their approach and the problems it solves.

-> Microsoft is also adopting the hybrid app approach. They recently shipped new versions of their Bing for Mobile app that is built with HTML5 in a native container. They also managed to createintense anxiety among their developer community when they mentioned that Windows 8 will support creation of native apps in HTML5. It's unclear how this HTML5 goodness (err, badness if you are a nervous XAML ninja) will appear in the Windows Phone environment, but it seems likely that it will.

-> Facebook's recent talent acquisition of Strobe is further proof of the importance of this new approach. Strobe was the company formed to build a business around Charles Jolley's Sproutcore, an open source JavaScript framework for creating touch web apps that could be combined with a native container to make a hybrid app. Before the acquisition, Strobe had started building out commercial cloud services surrounding the free framework.

Now that they are part of Facebook, the fate of the core technology and those cloud services is in limbo. But one thing is crystal clear: Facebook is putting Charles and team to work on its app strategy and that strategy is all about hybrid app experiences.

What About Performance?

There is a meme out there in some technical circles that says that apps based on an HTML5 WebView wrapped in a native container are always going to suffer poorer performance than a pure native app. The fact that the largest companies in the industry are using the hybrid app approach should be enough to put this to bed. Sure, there are going to be specific scenarios and types of apps where HTML5 is not going to work well, but for a very wide variety of content-centric app experiences, well-optimized HTML5, augmented by native APIs, is performing great.

What We’re Doing About It

The answer to all the above challenges is one, Mobitop.