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Packaging & Distribution in the Digital Age: Or, Why Even Grandma Loves Apps

There's long been a raging debate going over HTML vs. Native Apps.  Just Googling the debate returns over 3.7 million results.

I'm here to tell you, that's the wrong way of thinking of things.

It's like debating whether oil or water will win when mixed.  You can't get the right answer if you're asking the wrong question.  While oil and water don't mix well, they can co-exist in the same bottle, and there are valid times you might want to use each.

Let's dive into the right way to think about mobile, and specifically about the role native apps will play.  A better analogy of the mobile landscape is from the point of view of a car manufacturer like Honda.  Honda makes a lot of Honda Accords -- they're its bread & butter.  But for years, Honda had a Formula One team.  A Honda Accord will never compete at the Formula One level, nor was it meant to.  And conversely, if Honda only had a Formula One team, it wouldn't have the massive market share in the auto market that the Accord and other bread & butter models provide it, but Honda did learn a lot about how to make really great engines from its Formula One program.

In the same way, mobile apps are the "Formula One" of mobile, and HTML is the Honda Accord.  You can get wide distribution across many phones by having a mobile HTML presence, but you can't do the sexy, progressive types of things that you can do with apps, because an app is typically compiled software which can leverage the specific hardware functionality of the phone (the camera, the address book, geolocation, the microphone, and many other things).

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: