What's the point? [LWN.net]

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 21:27 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)
In reply to: What's the point? by khim
Parent article: Mozilla announces HTML5-based phone

>> Unless you are doing something special, the question will be why giving up the benefits of HTML5 will be worth going native.

> What benefits? Try-before-buy is available on mobile without HTML5 inconvenience

iOS apps are not sandboxed, they are manually inspected by App Store people for malware and so forth. So you do have try-before-buy on iOS, but only because the App Store is curated. And curation is a problem as many developers have found, with Apple reviewers being slow or arbitrary in their decisions. Lack of curation is an advantage of HTML5.

> and as I already wrote history shows that cross-platform solutions remain popular only for a short time till the winning platform emerges.

I would argue the exact opposite. In the beginning, native apps win easily because native app platforms can be created and innovated with quickly. Later, standards-based cross-platform solutions appear, that eventually fill in the gaps between them and native apps, and then the benefits of being standards-based and cross-platform win out.

For example, we all used to use native mail apps once upon a time. Today, most of us use HTML5 webmail.

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What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:19 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

For example, we all used to use native mail apps once upon a time. Today, most of us use HTML5 webmail.

I'm curious if you have any pointers to data that supports this claim. You may well be right, but I would be a bit surprised. Around here (University environment) nearly everyone uses either a university- or gmail- based mail service. But they use native-mail-app-of-choice via IMAP or Exchange, not a web interface. Or maybe you were only thinking of smart phone Email access?

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:31 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

Well, data is hard to come by, if someone uses "gmail" then I assume they are using the webmail interface, but they can be using it through IMAP and a standalone client. Likewise if someone uses "outlook" then it might be the native client, or it could be the outlook HTML interface.

Personally, I don't think I know anyone that *doesn't* use gmail with it's web interface. The exceptions are yahoo and hotmail, also with their web interfaces.

Best data I can find is that gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail each have >300M users [1]. It's harder to measure usage of native email clients.

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-stat...