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The Evolving Definition of "App"

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now, and a recent post by Bill French of iPadCTO spurred me into action.

It's been interesting to experience the changing definition of an "app".

The most popular definition of an "app" is native software that typically runs on a smartphone, and most commonly the iPhone.  It's compiled software built using ObjectiveC in X Code, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Mac OS X.  If it sounds complicated, that's because it is - developers who have the ability to build "apps" are in high demand these days.

But the line that defines an app is being massively blurred.  Take for example, OpenAppMkt, run by my friend Teck Chia, which packages "web apps" into an "app store".  These aren't apps in the traditional sense -- in fact they're just websites packaged up to look and feel like native apps.

But what Teck and many others are doing gets to a fundamental tenet of the allure of apps:  while you browse the web, you don't own the web.  Being on the web is a very nomadic experience.  You visit your favorite sites, then you visit other sites, but there's very little sense of ownership on the web.

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: