I stumbled upon this presentation, shared by Chad Udel, comparing four main mobile OSes. Chad used this for his presentation at mLearnCon 2010. Take a look -
So Native Apps vs Web Apps?
The presentation gives a good initial comparison of the 4 OSes. The question however will be which phone to target? Should you make a web app that works on all of these phones or a device specific native app?
Both types of solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Here’s what I think they are:
Web Apps
- Platform independent development, so can reach a wider range of audience
- The app can be delivered instantaneously as there are no intermediate delivery platforms like app store
- Faster development and lower maintenance
- High end (rich) applications can be developed if HTML5/CSS3 technology is used for development, which also enable use of audio, video and animation within the application
- Performance would be lower as compared with that of native apps and will also be dependent on the web access speed
Native Apps
- Lets you access the device’s features like camera, accelerometer or the data like address book
- Superior in terms of performance and user experience
- Works only on targeted smartphones
- Development time would be more so would be the maintenance overheads
- The app has to go through some kind of app store / marketplace before it reaches the intended audience and the process could be time consuming and fuzzy
The choice really depends on the richness of your mLearning solution (user experience, performance and features) and the range of audience (rather smartphones) you are targeting. There is a range of third-party frameworks and tools that are getting available to develop reasonable apps which may let you use goodness of both the types.
With advent of HTML5 and the emergent web standardization across smartphone devices, I feel rather optimistic about web apps as better choice over native apps in near future.
July 14th, 2010 at 12:32 am
This is the best thing about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. Build once and deploy on multiple devices. Its a shame some of players will not allow Flash on their devices.
July 14th, 2010 at 1:22 am
Hi Sushil,
One of the benefits of Nokia phones is the ease of deploying apps to them. You don’t have to go through the Nokia Ovi Store, you can just put your app on a website to download.
Using PhoneGap it’s really quite easy to create a web-based app and convert it to a Nokia app.
Cheers,
Mark
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Sushil,
This is a great summary of the differences between native and web apps. I share your optimism about web apps for a number of reasons. I really think it’s the easiest path forward and with learning organizations having limited resources, I see most of them adopting a web-heavy approach with their mobile learning. That is not to say that there isn’t room for native apps, especially those that can aggregate web content and those that allow for the learner to create learning content on their device. I am hoping we’ll see exploitation of the technological affordances (camera, accelerometer, GPS, etc.) to create learning rather than for consumption only. Mobile learning offers a two-way learning experience and that is a key differentiator for mobile.
February 22nd, 2011 at 10:55 pm
I suggest staying away from any platforms that make the “write once & publish everywhere” promise. I can see the lure for beginning developers, those platforms typically offer the worst of both worlds. They don’t maximize the specific functionality of each device the way a true native app would nor are they as universal and easy to maintain as a good HTML5 web app.
September 19th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
another opinion on the native vs web apps debate:
http://blog.investis.com/2011/07/enough-already-about-web-app-vs-native-app/