Web Apps: the Future of the Internet, Or Forever a Second-Class Citizen?

An anonymous reader writes "This article takes a look at whether web apps will ever match desktop and mobile apps in terms of performance and usability. Jo Rabin, who's leading the push by web standards body W3C to get web app performance up to scratch, is optimistic web apps will eventually be the default choice for building the majority of commercial and business apps, while the article weighs up just how much web technologies need to be improved before this could happen. Quoting: 'Native apps are generally first to gain access to new platform-specific hardware features — be it navigating using a phone's GPS and accelerometer or taking pictures with a phone's camera. But if a particular hardware feature becomes popular, standards to implement that feature in the browser will always follow, Rabin said. Work is taking place within W3C to standardise APIs for web technologies to access many of the features found on modern smartphones. Ongoing work this year includes setting out a system-level API to allow a web app to manage a device's contacts book, a messaging API for sending and receiving SMS and MMS, new mechanisms for capturing photos and recordings, new event triggers that could handle mouse, pen and touch inputs, a new push API to allow web apps to receive messages in the background, new media queries for responsive web design, an API for exchanging information using NFC and precise control over resource loading times in a web document.'"

Why does this get asked every N months?

[sootman]

The answer will forever be NO, until the bandwidth between me and the server == the bandwidth between my CPU and its main memory. AND latency, AND availability.

The fastest web apps TODAY are still slower than the native apps that shipped on the first iPhone in 2007.

Besides that, both kinds have their own unique advantages. The first two: web apps allow you to get at the data from any device with an Internet connection and browser, but native apps work when you don't have network connectivity at all. If neither of those is a make-it-or-break-it aspect of your app, then you look at all the other advantages each offers, which have been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere.

Re:In what way did that make any sense?

[Jason Levine]

Effort for end-user to update their copy of your application to the newest: web app, none. native app, some to none (depending upon preferences set in app store application). Winner, web app.

This alone is a big plus in the web app category. If you discover a big bug/security hole in your app and make a fix, for a native app you need to submit this fix, wait for it to be approved, and then wait for your user base to upgrade. This means that many users will continue to use your buggy/vulnerable app for awhile both putting them at risk and hurting your image.

If you discover a big bug/security hole in your web app, though, and make a fix, it is fixed. Everyone immediately sees the fixed version and (hopefully) will notice how much better it is.

Plus, with a web app, you have one code base across Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc. One code base means less chance that the port to platform X resulted in a horrible bug and it means that all of your resources can go to making that one code base as good as possible. Which means less bugs/vulnerabilities to fix in the first place.