When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Another example of developers coming to their senses – accounting software developers Xero are ditching HTML5 in favour of native iOS and Android apps
In their blog post, the company explain that developing in HTML and JavaScript was not the wisest decision:
…building a complicated mobile application in HTML5 has been hard. Even with frameworks as amazing as Sencha Touch, we’ve found the ability to iterate as fast as we would like has become harder as our application has become more complex.
The HTML / JavaScript stack initially seem attractive as a time-saving route to development, but sadly this isn’t always the case. In an attempt to save time for the developer, the user ends up with a third-rate experience. Xero say:
Xero prides itself on not compromising on customer experience, and when it comes down to it, the question isn’t “How can we use our existing skills to build a mobile application?” but “What is going to enable us to deliver the best customer experience on the mobile devices that our customers use?”
There has been a cost:
And the lesson we’ve learnt over the last 12 months has been that the cost in time, effort and testing to bring an HTML5 application to a native level of performance seems to be far greater than if the application was built with native technologies from the get-go.
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, wrote something similar two years ago in his guest post, Four Lessons from Evernote’s First Week on the Mac App Store. Libin wrote then that:
…people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.
Sure, I agree, it would be nice to write once, run anywhere, but, as with Java desktop apps, you never get the best experience. Libin is realistic:
As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.
When all you have is a team of HTML and JavaScript developers, everything looks…third-rate.