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Native Apps vs. HTML5: The Smoking Gun

I've moderated and participated on a bunch of panels where the topic was something like "HTML5 vs. Native apps, which will win?"  And I've always said that native apps aren't going away, and my co-founder Sean has often pointed out that HTML5 won't be replacing complied apps so long as mobile hardware is changing drastically every 6 months (HTML is a trailing standard that can't keep up with innovation on the hardware side).  

But here's the real smoking gun:

The Facebook engineering team, in a blog post, writes, "we realized that when it comes to platforms like iOS, people expect a fast, reliable experience and our iOS app [that was heaving leveraging HTML5] was falling short."

This is really significant.  Facebook has a lot of incredibly good reasons not to rebuild its app natively.  Facebook doesn't want to be beholden to Apple for its distribution channel and access to its users.  Facebook doesn't want to have to create and maintain completely different and incompatible codebases for various distribution channels.  Facebook arguably has the very best web engineers on the planet.  And yet they've moved away from a heavily dependent HTML5 strategy in mobile.

So for anyone saying they're going to completely move to HTML5 and stop (or not start) native app development, I say that approach will only work if:

I'll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours... Apps, that is

The Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles about the app economy this week, identifying the app ecosystem as a $25 billion business.  They write:

If you're interested in mobile, and apps in particular, I highly recommend searching this series of articles out.

When my co-founders and I started PointAbout, a mobile app dev shop in 2008, we had a really hard time convincing businesses that apps were more than just a fad.  Then in the 4th quarter of 2009 something significant happened:  I started to see budgets for app creation move from the "experimental" bucket to a dedicated budget.  That's when the most forward-thinking businesses started to build mobile apps and we were able to build a strong business making apps for Disney, The Washington Post, Cars.com and many others.

But still, many businesses don't get it.  I recently wrote a warning to Fortune 1000 CEOs because I'm convinced many of them will be fired for underestimating the impact of mobile on their businesses.

For businesses that are trying to figure out how to really double down on mobile, I'd like to highlight a startup that recently launched called Automatic.  It combines a $70 accessory that plugs into a car's ODBII port with a mobile app, allowing the car to communicate with the phone.  This is a beautiful example of how a company took something that's always been available -- diagnostic information from your car -- and turned it into something humans actually care about, with features like "Never forget where you parked," "Automatic calls for help in a crash," "Save hundreds on gas every year" and "Keep your engine healthy."  The way Automatic is unleashing data that's always been available in a new and very innovative (and valuable) way via the mobile device is a great example of how mobile is changing everything.