Html 5 And Cross Platform App Development

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
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Designing an app to run on multiple mobile platforms natively is like designing a car with multiple fuel option variants. The car looks and feels the same, but the engineering for a petrol vs. a diesel engine is completely different. The manufacturer has to set up completely different assembly lines for the engine assembly, and might need to segregate other dependent technologies too. Further, the service centers have to be geared to handle repairs on the models differently. However, while the car manufacturer has the luxury of transferring the cost of this diversity to the buyer, most developers don’t.

With the cost of development and management of the same app on different native platforms screwing the budgets of most developers and enterprises, the search for a mechanism of running the same code onto multiple platforms turned into a fervent hunt. That is where HTML5 promised to be the light at the end of the tunnel.

Cross-platform mobile apps

Cross-platform mobile apps are apps that once created, can run on multiple mobile platforms like Android, iOS, Blackberry etc.

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... Pros

This saves a tremendous amount of development effort, since there is only one instance of the app that is being created. Cross-platform apps also reduce the support and management effort considerably for the same reason. Because of the reduced effort and subsequently the cost, cross-platform apps are much more lucrative for the enterprise.

Cons

While on the face of it cross-platform apps provide better ROI and ease of development/management, they come with inherent complexities. Managing user experience across multiple devices is a challenge. Also, since every mobile platform has its own idiosyncrasies and flaws, they sometimes get amplified when deploying cross-platform apps.

HTML5

HTML5 apps use standard web technologies—typically HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. This “Write One, Run Many” solution requires you to write your code once, which can be run over different platforms. Essentially, HTML 5 uses the mobile web browser as the runtime environment instead of the native operating system. It is like accessing a website, only in the form of an app.

A variation of this approach is a Hybrid application. A hybrid app is a combination of HTML5 and native app. Developers can embed HTML5 apps inside a thin native container, combining the best (and worst) elements of native and HTML5 apps.

Pros and Cons

HTML5 addresses the commercial and resource issues associated with native apps through cross-platform availability. Further, web developers are cheaper and more easily available than native mobile developers. Also, the mobile web is infinite, while the storage and memory for apps on a device are limited. HTML5 web based apps use minimal device resources. Lastly, maintenance, content management, and analytics is much more easier on mobile sites.

However, it has its own issues related to the maturity and stability of the platform itself. Lack of available APIs, absence of DRM, and the limited access to device features are some of the many issues that plague the supposed panacea of the mobile app development world. Hybrid apps are better than full HTML5, but they too depend on the web code and the native code playing nice with each other. Also, they are still outperformed by their native counterparts.

However, the W3C (world wide web consortium) has been working hard on the maturity and stability of the 5th version of their markup language, and there are daily developments that indicate that the light at the end of the tunnel will not prove to be that of an oncoming train.

The author is associated with a well known enterprise application development company, mobile app developers Dallas and Mobile Application Development Noida company