Imagine a time when your phone does not need an app store, but rather loads up it’s apps via the web. Instead of installing an app through an app store, you just load up a website through the browser. Web apps have become much more sophisticated in recent years, especially on phones, where new technologies like HTML5 have advanced so much that they can mimic native apps.
The concept is awesome. Not needing storage on your phone is one massive advantage, especially because getting storage upgrade can be costly (see the iPhone) but it also might mean that developers have more of a chance to play in the mobile game without needing to learn native skills. Someone who knows a bit of HTML could create a web app that’s available on every smartphone platform, without learning any native libraries. Sounds cool, no?
Mozilla are one company hoping for this future. Of course, Mozilla does not just have an idealistic vision; they’re trying to push their WebAPI product, which aims at trying to get web apps to compete more levelly with native apps. Right now, even though web apps do work fairly well on mobile (and even have optimisations for them; again, see the iPhone), they just don’t compare with native apps. There’s too many obstacles.
The Current Obstacles
Web Apps Need the Web
This is perhaps the main obstacle in the way of web apps completely replacing native apps; the majority of web apps don’t have an offline cache or are otherwise hindered without a working internet connection. Our smartphones have WiFi and likely some good 3G (or 4G) connectivity but it’s not always a constant. If you lose the data connection, you lose the app.
As you know, an unreliable app isn’t a good app. If it doesn’t work when you want it to work, there’s really no point in having it installed on your device and without the web, a lot of web apps don’t work. To be optimistic, web apps are advancing to a stage in which they can work offline, such as in the case of Google’s apps, where a cache is present.
Web Apps Aren’t Optimised
Again, another fatal flaw is that loading another web page generally takes more time than loading another screen of a native apps, since that page is stored off the device, not on it. Being based off a universal language, such as HTML, means that the app isn’t optimised for a specific device and might have performance differences because of that.
Additionally, web apps won’t share the UI standards that native apps use. Controls will be different, so will layouts and just the overall theme of the app, making it less user-friendly than a more standardised native app. Case in point, the Wunderlist and Dropbox iPad apps look the same running natively, but their web apps are extremely different.
Web Apps Lack Hardware Access
There’s several other, minor reasons why native apps top web apps on phones, but the final, major one is the lack of hardware access. Because they’re not written with the native SDK, integrating with hardware such as GPS or cameras is much less seamless. Something as subtle as the “Open in iBooks” link of a PDF attachment in the iOS Mail app, or attaching of a photo in Twitter, is much more difficult to acheive when the app does not reside on the device.
WebAPI to the Rescue
It looks like Mozilla might just step in and save the day with WebAPI. Mozilla wants the web to “catch up”, and has formed the WebAPI team in order to provide necessary APIs to web developers to level the playing field between web apps and native apps. For example, Mozilla aims to provide hardware and native software APIs, such as access to a phone’s dialler or camera, within a matter of months.
If they build a single operating system for apps to run under, it’s going to be great for everyone (except maybe Apple, since they lose out on that 30% cut of success), but so many have tried and failed. Plus, with other companies like Facebook looking to achieve similar things and create rival web app platforms, the whole “cross-platform” thing might not work if there’s still too many platforms.
Comically, though, this was actually Steve Job’s first recommendation for iPhone development. It seems a distant memory now, but the original iPhone in 2007 did not have an App Store, and Jobs recommended developers create web apps for this new internet capable phone. Apple’s now-neglected web apps site is a relic of Apple’s original initiative to jumpstart mobile web app development. All changed with the introduction of the App Store, and for the most part, consumers now look in the App Store by default instead of looking online for a web app. When there are Google apps to search Google, when you could just do it in Safari, you know consumers have become addicted to native apps.
The question is, can Mozilla fare any better? I guess we’ll have to check in within a few months to see how the project is going.