Jay Leonard
Back in 2011, Facebook encouraged developers to use HTML5 technology. The platform is the site’s central piece to mobile strategy and Facebook wanted developers to choose HTML5 over building native iOS or Android apps.
Doing so would enable the world’s most popular social networking site to sidestep relatively closed intermediaries like Apple when it wants to roll out new platform functionality. Many game developers have been choosing HTML5 over native apps.
An HTML5 app is housed on the Web and runs inside a mobile browser. That differs from apps built specifically for Apple devices or Google’s Android operating system. HTML5 does not need to be built from scratch for each OS. The developers are looking for efficient ways to build games since HTML5 enables them to “write once and have it run anywhere.”
Mobile veteran Erdolo Eromo believes that HTML5 offers advantages that native apps don’t have. “With Apple and Google taking the lion’s share of revenues from game developers, direct carrier billing through companies like Payvia has become an attractive option for developers everywhere.”
HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting content for the web and a core technology of the Internet. According to Wikipedia, “its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices”.
HTML5 faces challenges in the area of rich user experience and performance. Some industry experts contend that native apps are better suited for graphically-rich user interfaces. Additionally, some developers believe that native apps is better for monetization given that they can use Apple’s App Store and Google Play to reach out to a larger audience.
What has been the marketplace’s receptivity to HTML5? Eromo, who founded Payvia, saw the business increase its 2012 revenues by 400 percent. “The Direct Carrier Billing model, offered by companies like Payvia, is becoming one of the most attractive options for HTML5 monetization and offers a viable alternative to individual vendors selling their apps online.”
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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It’s kind of weird having an article about HTML5 that mentions Facebook choosing it, but avoiding every mention that about a year later Zuckerberg called that decision the biggest mistake he ever made (http://mashable.com/2012/09/11/html5-biggest-mistake/). Facebook cancelled the decision to use HTML to develop their mobile apps and went back to native development with huge gains in performance and user happiness. The HTML5 debate is a controversial one to say the least, and i would expect from a serious article that it would highlight pros but also the many cons of a technology. Unfortunately “write once run everywhere” is a utopia that was tried often before (Java comes to mind) but always failed, as the most experienced developers remember.
Facebook needed something to blame and is now stuck supporting several different mobile teams and is looking for an alternative again that will go cross platform which knowing their culture and needs they will probably build in house. Also Facebook just had a major poor launch of their home app so obviously they can’t scapegoat HTML5 this time. The business reasons Facebook tried HTML5, which has improved since 2011, will fit most enterprise and consumer apps just fine, and is even more valid now for most companies without facing a horribly overcrowded appstore. Also HTML5 CAN go in the appstore too with wrappers like Phonegap which is extremely popular.
An article that mentions Facebook adopting HTML5 but not mentioning that Zuckerberg, a year later, said that it was the biggest mistake he ever made? I question your research… http://mashable.com/2012/09/11/html5-biggest-mistake/
HTML5 is the most popular choice for the enterprise and can be wrapped and put in the app store also if the business choses. The only applications that should probably chose a different “have a separate team for every mobile platform” and build native are those with absolutely gigantic and intensive consumer facing apps like facebook. The only other ones that shouldn’t use HTML5 high performance graphic intensive ones that actually use opengl-es underneath, not native (people mistakenly call that native), opengl-es with it’s cousin webgl go across platform for high performance and are often lumped with HTML5 family of open source tools.