LinkedIn has just launched the latest versions of its mobile apps, and in a stunning reversal, it’s gone from mobile web-based apps back to fully native.

Less than a year ago, the company was touting its iPad app as fully mobile-web based, with just one screen, the homescreen, running natively. Now, all that’s gone, as is some of the optimism about the current capabilities of the mobile web.

In a revealing chat with Kiran Prasad (pictured), LinkedIn’s senior director for mobile engineering, we learned exactly why — and it’s not what you think. Prasad said performance issues weren’t causing crashes or making the app run slowly. What he did say shows that HTML5 for the mobile web still has a bright future — but only if developers are willing to build the tools to support it.

Related HTML5 coverage:

PRO: 90 percent of developers plan to use HTML5 this year.

CON: 80 percent of people’s mobile time is spent in apps, not the browser.

Here’s the bulk of our chat with Prasad on engineering topics around the new apps:

VentureBeat: [interrupting interview about the app launch] Wait, let’s go back a second. Did you just say these apps are native? Isn’t that the exact opposite of where you guys were philosophically the last time we talked about mobile?

Prasad: We have definitely shifted from HTML5 to native. The primary reason for that is, we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory. It’s not performance issues, like speed or rendering, but it’s still a big problem.

The second reason we’ve gone native is trying to get some of the animations — the spinners and the way they work — getting that smoothness, we felt like we needed native to really do that well.

VentureBeat: Does this mean that LinkedIn is giving up on developing mobile web apps or working with mobile web technologies?

Prasad: The way we built our system, we used template JSONs. We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email. When we were [serving] a smaller group [of users], we were hoping we could duplicate all that mobile web work to make our clients faster in terms of code deploys. It worked really well when mobile only made up 8 to 10 percent of traffic. … I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but we recognize now that HTML5 is not allowing us to do the best for our users.

VentureBeat: So what would it take for mobile web technologies to meet the needs of a company like LinkedIn and with apps as widely used as yours?

Prasad: There are a few things that are critically missing. One is tooling support — having a debugger that actually works, performance tools that tell you where the memory is running out.

If you look at Android and iOS, there are two very large corporations that are focused on building tools to give a lot of detailed information when things go wrong in production. On the mobile web side, getting those desktop tools to work for mobile devices is really difficult.

The second big chunk we are struggling with is operability, runtime diagnostics information. Even now, when we build HTML5, we build it as a client-side app. It’s more of a client-server architecture. … The operability of that, giving us information when we’re distributed to a large volume of users, there aren’t as many great tools to support that, as well.

[Prasad also noted that dev and ops tools for solving issues quickly "don't exist."]

Because those two things don’t exist, people are falling back to native. It’s not that HTML5 isn’t ready; it’s that the ecosystem doesn’t support it. … There are tools, but they’re at the beginning. People are just figuring out the basics.

Image credit: Kirin Prasad/Twitter

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That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc

Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a platform for mobile game developers.

The stage was set with an expected one billion HTML5 phones sold by 2013. Facebook was ready to pave the way. I could repeat many other reasons why HTML5 should have taken off in 2012, but as we’ve seen over the last year, it just didn’t. Mark Zuckerberg said it best, “The biggest mistake we did as a company was bet too much on HTML5.”

Here’s an explanation for why HTML5 did not meet the high expectations set last year.

1. Cross-Platform HTML5 Development Hasn’t Taken Off

There is a massive split between desktop and mobile HTML5. Just because the technology exists across desktop and mobile, doesn’t mean the design issues have changed:

1) Keyboard compared to keypad
2) Screen size of the platform
3) Mouse compared to touchscreen.

It’s optimal to develop products for a specific platform. This allows developers to personalize the look, feel, and functionality of an app, which is extremely important from a user experience standpoint. The assumption held by many who were looking to HTML5, was that users would access apps across devices, from desktop to mobile. In reality, users will pick the one with the best functionality and naturally gravitate to the platform on which an app works best.

When it comes to mobile, an app has to be developed with the mobile user in mind. Nothing is more frustrating for a developer than devoting time across multiple platforms, only to discover later that your users prefer one device over another. No matter what, developing across multiple platforms takes time, energy, and thoughtfulness.

2. App Stores Deliver Discoverability, HTML5-Only Sites Are Out in the Woods

It’s easy to create a browser link with a homescreen icon for a mobile device, but much harder to change cultural practices. The challenge HTML5 publishers experience is creating an easy and positive experience to access hybrid apps. Mobile users now expect to be told to download an app and, instinctively, users search for apps in stores. Google and Apple dominate these stores and have thus far not made steps towards including HTML5 sites.

Facebook created the most publicized “universal store,” listing both native and sites in HTML5 — some believe as a way to circumvent Apple and Google’s app stores. With the hopes of coaxing them to include HTML5 apps, Facebook assembled a network of developers under the W3C but so far that strategy has not shown traction.

3. Hybrid Apps Can’t Depend on Mobile Browsers

I thought that at least one major console game would be released or re-released using WebGL. It may have happened, but in lieu of the previous point, the big mobile browser players like Chrome and Safari have shown no intention to grow their browsers to fully support HTML5 technologies. For example, WebGL, a central tool for 3D game development has been incompatible with the aforementioned mobile browsers.

Compatibility is one issue, but there’s also speed on the mobile browser. Findings from a study we conducted earlier this year showed that HTML5 running on mobile browsers was ten to seven hundred times slower than when running on a desktop. In fact, on average mobile browsers were 889 times slower. Implicit within this data is that a large percentage of mobile users have a poor experience when accessing web apps that are graphical in nature.

4. Fragmentation, Fragmentation, Fragmentation

Is the name of the game when it comes to hybrid apps. Anyone who has built a website has experienced browser compatibility issues. Double these across platforms and you have a headache. For example, Sean Soria, an engineer for Gamzee described some of the issues they faced building Skyscraper City in a guest post for Facebook’s HTML5 blog.

In the post Soria describes a hack to increase speed on the DOM “is fake 3D transforms on your CSS. That triggers hardware acceleration on most mobile devices, resulting in better performance than Canvas, for example.” This is awesome — except the workaround doesn’t work on Android phones. There are many issues like this, where both problems and solutions are distinct on each device.

5. HTML5 Isn’t Robust Enough

From what I’ve seen, the hype has led to many people overestimating how much developers like using JavaScript. Is JavaScript great for cross platform development? Yes. Do developer prefer it over possible alternatives? Not quite yet. For more complicated apps, especially games, object-oriented and more strongly typed languages are still preferred by developers.

So, HTML5 didn’t pan quite how we thought it was going to. It turned into a scapegoat for Facebook and possibly one of the most overhyped advancements of the mobile generation. If HTML5 truly is the future, than we’re much farther from that future then we thought. That’s not to say that HTML5 won’t get it right some day – just not any time soon.

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Now stop imagining and just watch the video below.

I just interviewed Kent Mitchell, Zend’s senior director of product management. Zend, of course, is the company that makes the most-used PHP development environment. It’s the company started by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the primary originators of the PHP language (after founder Rasmus Lerdorf).

PHP jockies out there will be impressed, I think, to find that Mitchell is not just a marketing drone … he’s a full-on, hard-core, honest-to-goodness developer.

And given that Zend just announced the ability to create mobile apps directly within Zend Studio, I challenged him to show me how it works, from start to finish.

I think when you’ll watch that you will find he came pretty damn close:

As Mitchell says, “In just a few minutes, I’ve created a new web service, I’ve deployed it into the cloud, and I’ve created some new widgets on this mobile site. Now, we want to turn around and make this a native application.”

And he does, in just a few more clicks, create a project that is tied to the Xcode tools that iOS developers would normally use to create native apps. The same functionality, of course, is possible for Android applications.

Frankly, this is pretty amazing.

While creating apps, developers can test and view their apps right on their development machine, and integrated debugging is included. It’s an over-used expression, but this is a game-changer for developers and enterprises.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This post was written by Jaafer Haidar, vice president of mobile at cloud-based content platform Synacor.

Every once in a while, necessity brings strange bedfellows together towards a common goal. Apollo Creed and Rocky joined forces to take on Clubber Lang in Rocky III, Batman and Catwoman teamed up against Bane in The Dark Knight Rises … and lately my wife and sister are working together to prevent me from trying skydiving. Either way, unexpected couplings must occur to ensure success where one party couldn’t go it alone. When you take a look at the future of mobile, HTML5 and Digital Rights Management (DRM) are an unstoppable team, but they need each other in order to win the code wars.

Native Apps Mean Everyone Has To Sacrifice

Let’s first admit something: We don’t love apps — we love what apps give us. The content we want, when we want it, in the palm of our hand. It’s all about the delivery and experience; we could care less whether it’s in the form of an installed app or a web app as long as it is always there at our fingertips. That said, there is an impact for all when a native app is created.

• For Publishers: Native apps mean developing an app for every platform or sacrificing part of the audience you’re trying to reach. Developing and supporting all these apps is very expensive.

• For Consumers (all of us): (a) Hope there’s an app for your mobile platform (b) If you have devices operating on different platforms, you need to purchase the app for each platform (c) Hope the app is specifically designed for your phone and tablet.

Content Should Live Free but that Doesn’t Mean it is Free.

There are HTML5 apps and games that rival and even outperform native applications. The biggest brands such as Google, YouTube, LinkedIn and OpenTable (among others) are championing HTML5 — and delivering the goods. The only thing holding back HTML5 from killing native apps is DRM.

Let’s be honest, production studios are in business to make money from the content they produce. Right now, native apps provide the protections studios require, but the ironic thing is that every video delivered through native apps is not Flash-based. Publishers have already done the heavy lifting for HTML5 delivery. They want to deliver videos in a mobile app that works across all devices — phone, tablet, laptop, and connected TVs. They want to build once, deliver everywhere. Publishers will then be able to get out of the dev shop business, and premium content will flourish online. HTML5 DRM enables this to happen — opening the floodgates.

HTML5’s Missing Key

Before the tech-must-be-free purists get excited, let’s discuss the current landscape. HTML5 is the promise of the web being a platform where content can live freely; a world where the device doesn’t matter, whether it’s your iPhone, iPad, Android device, laptop, or connected TV – all you need is the Web and you can get your stuff anytime anywhere. I agree 100% with this sentiment (in fact, I co-founded a company based on these exact principles of freedom). It’s a beautiful promise, but you know what’s missing from its current form? Video.

Video is one of the most popular thing to do online after checking email, conducting a search, or using Facebook. As tablets and phones are rapidly becoming the way most people use the web, few sites outside of YouTube have worked some back-end magic to ensure you can watch what you want when you want it. Ever visit your favorite site on an iPad only to see a black box where you could swear there should be a video? It sucks.

There are three things to consider with mobile web video:

• Free or not, most video is in Flash format: That’s how it’s been forever, and there’s a whole ecosystem of rights management, advertising, social, and more tools at play.

• The Chicken and the Egg: Publishers need a full ecosystem of tools to make money. At the same time, we’ve seen limited evolution of a non-Flash web video ecosystem because toolmakers need publisher demand before they invest in creating the tools. HTML5 DRM is the catalyst for the ecosystem’s development.

• Native Apps fill the Void: Nobody supports Flash on mobile. Not Apple or Microsoft or Android … and soon not even Adobe. Flash on mobile is a dying technology. If you want to watch videos from your favorite places like Hulu, HBO, or even TMZ, then don’t go into the web browser, visit the app store and download the native app.

And therein lies the rub: if you want to watch videos on your mobile, download the app. The reason? Within native apps, the video content can be protected. Of course, if you get the app, you’re tied to your device (iPhone, iPad, Android, etc.). This is where DRM comes in handy for the ecosystem.

HTML5 Needs DRM to Win

Yes, there are some who believe DRM in any form goes against the very idea of HTML5. This ideal forces them to make a decision: Either believe that a video-less mobile web world can win or understand that consumers want the good stuff and to get it, it needs to be protected.

Even the large “Internet companies” recognize this. A previously proposed joint HTML5 DRM proposal from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was a step in the right direction. Without a doubt, the industry needs a standard way to protect and deliver video over the web.

So lace up and get in the ring, my freedom loving friends. HTML5 and DRM are coming together for the better of the web – like Rocky and Apollo – it’s inevitable and only natural. DRM will fulfill the very promise of HTML5 — an open world where we’re free from device lock-in, and the web is the platform that rightfully wins.

Jaafer Haidar is head of Synacor’s mobile and multi-screen strategy. He is an expert and visionary in the power that HTML5 provides to consumer electronics OEMs and service providers in creating the best possible consumer experience across devices.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t mince words today about the company’s past mobile strategy.

“The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, referring to the original HTML5-powered Facebook mobile apps that were plagued with slowdowns and other issues.

Facebook last month released a native iOS app that’s built specifically for Apple’s platform and is subsequently much faster. We’re still waiting for word on a native Android app, but Zuckerberg promised that one was on the way.

The company’s move away from “hybrid apps,” or mobile apps that rely heavily on HTML5, was a major blow against other developers pushing for the hybrid app approach. While the original hybrid apps were slow for users, they also made it easy for the company to deploy updates and changes across multiple platforms. Now Facebook has to go through a much more arduous process to update its iOS and Android apps.

Speaking with TechCrunch and CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg elaborated on his issues with Facebook’s past mobile apps: “We’re very self critical … it was not where we wanted to be before (laughs) … but to be honest even what we have now isn’t as good as it can be.”

Zuckerberg pointed out that the company has more usage on its mobile website (also HTML5 powered) than its iOS and Android apps combined, so Facebook isn’t going to run away from HTML5 entirely. “But we just couldn’t bet completely on it,” he said. For both iOS and Android, he said you could do much better work with native apps.

Photo via TechCrunch Disrupt’s livestream

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-based HR software company Workday has launched the latest version of its suite with an emphasis on mobile access through HTML5 web apps, the company announced today.

Workday competes with SAP and Oracle in the professional software and services realm. With more than 280 customers ranging from medium-sized businesses to Fortune 50 companies, it is trying to come up with new ways to deliver and implement core human resources software like payroll, financial management, and human capital management. Now it will expand its already strong mobile offerings for the increasingly out-of-the-office workforce.

“So much change is happening in the mobile space right now, and we want to be part of that,” Workday CTO Stan Swete told VentureBeat. “The HTML5 app will let you do almost everything you can do in the native app. … The native apps are always improving too.”

The company plans to launch three big software updates this year, with its sixteenth overall version going live for all customers during the next week. The company will add HTML5 apps to the mix that will make its service accessible to all mobile devices, even if the user hasn’t downloaded a native Workday application. Workday notes that the updates include:

New Look and Feel: Workday 16 features significant enhancements to the mobile experience for the iPhone, iPad and other leading smartphone devices. A redesigned landing page delivers a sharper look and feel with more sophisticated navigation.
Workday for iPhone: New enhancements include Organizational Swirl, Workfeed activity stream, time-off balances, requests and approvals, and analytics.
Workday for iPad: Workday 16 delivers Anytime Feedback, time-off balances, requests, and approvals.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Workday was founded in 2005, has more than 1,000 employees, and has raised an eye-popping $250 million to date. It last raised a staggering $85 million round led by T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Janus Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, the investment company led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The company will almost certainly go public this year.

You can see a few more of Workday’s latest HTML5 and native mobile implementations below:

Photo credit: Tyler Olson/Shutterstock

Fusion-io has been mostly known as an enterprise company helping big names like Apple and Facebook to save money on their data center costs.

But today, the company is announcing its first software development kit (SDK) to provide software developers with native access to the ioMemory flash platform. The Fusion-io team is hoping the next Mark Zuckerberg will build his or her company with Fusion-io at its foundation.

Fusion-io CEO David Flynn compared this moment to the seminal shift between programming for tape and working with a disc. On only a handful of occasions in the past 60 years have software developers been given fundamentally new programming building blocks for memory or storage devices, the company explained. Until now, developers have been limited to tuning their applications for flash as storage. The ioMemory SDK libraries unlock direct programmatic access to native flash access patterns and data organization methods.

One of the beta testers for this new SDK was CitrusLeaf, a NoSQL database.

“Direct programmatic access to the ioMemory tier presents a rare and significant leap forward for computing, and theioMemory SDK makes that integration powerfully simple for application developers,” said Citrusleaf founder and CTO Brian Bulkowski in a statement. “When you consider that Fusion-io is already well known for accelerating applications, it’s exciting that bypassing traditional protocols in favor of direct access to ioMemory would mean an even greater performance boost in Citrusleaf’s NoSQL database for mission criticalwebscale applications. Our existing real time big data customers require low latency and extraordinary throughput, and with this revolution in application acceleration, end users will start asking if applications can run native on ioMemory.”

Onstage today at DEMO, Bulkowski gave an example of Fusion-io’s tech at work: an application with 400,000 transactions per second running on a single database server, representing a huge decrease in the amount of native memory required.

The ioMemory SDK, explained Fusion-io, will feature APIs including the Key-Value Store, which will feature interfaces to reduce latency, improve memory efficiency, and reduce code complexity.

“Improving the performance of input/output (I/O) bound applications or systems could be more pronounced and cost-effective if the choice of data to hold in flash memory is done in an intelligent and application-aware way,” said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch in a statement. “Competitive advantages for software will be the main driver pushing those makers to exploit flash as a unique memory type.”

Fusion-io is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s popular iOS App Store has now topped 25 billion downloads, a sign that mobile device owners are still hungry for well-built native applications.

On Apple’s site, the company has highlighted the achievement with a page that says: “A billion thanks. 25 times over.” The company had been promoting a contest where the person who broke the new milestone would win a $10,000 iTunes gift card. The milestone was broken some time in the past few days. Apple held a similar contest in Jan. 2011 when the company hit 10 billion App Store downloads.

While there have been persistent arguments about how well native mobile applications would fare against surging HTML5 development, at least when it comes to Apple, consumers are still plainly in love with native apps. Social networking apps like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are especially popular for iOS, as well as casual games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, and Where’s My Water?.

VentureBeat contributor and CBS Interactive CTO Peter Yared recently summed up the current state of the conflict between native and HTML5 well, saying: “While HTML5 has come a long way, it is still not up to par with the native app experience. Some publishers, such as the Financial Times and Playboy, have come close to native app functionality by investing heavily in HTML5 in order to bypass Apple’s 30 percent app store subscription fee. However, there are no turnkey JavaScript libraries that provide functionality such as efficient swiping and offline reading.”

What apps for the App Store have you been enjoying most lately?

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t achieve now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that right now. It’s a bridge to allow you to bring web content into a native app, but if you look even at the new LinkedIn app, it’s still mostly a native application.”

Dmitry Dragilev works for Zurb, a company that just released Foundation, a framework for designing apps that work across the web, both on mobile devices and desktops. The framework in action is somewhat magical. As the screen resolution changes from window to window and device to device, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

And since it’s web technology, it doesn’t have to be customized on a device-by-device basis. “The framework does all the work,” said Dragilev. “People don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore.”

The technology is intended to work on any kind of device, mobile or not, and Dragilev says, “That’s crucial now that mobile web use has started to overtake desktop use.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, iPhone users could soon get access to the rich Gmail experience that Android users have had since the beginning.

Google is close to launching a native Gmail app for the iPhone, MG Siegler reports. The app may already have been submitted to Apple for approval, and if so we could see it very soon.

This is big news for several reasons: Up until now, iPhone users who rely on Gmail have had a subpar mail experience on the device. You can set up Gmail as an Exchange server (this is my preferred method), which gives you access to Google Calendar on the iPhone as well, but you don’t get access to useful Gmail features like Priority Inbox. Google also updated its mobile web version of Gmail in 2009, which has been steadily upgraded but still lacks the speed and features of a native app.

A full-fledged Gmail iPhone app won’t be able to take the place of the iPhone’s built-in mail application (thanks a lot, Apple), but it could still offer a lot of useful features for Gmail addicts like myself. As Siegler points out, the app will likely offer push notifications, which can alert you whenever you get a new email. But for me, the real killer feature would be Priority Inbox support, as well as the ability to easily flag and access my email labels.

The app could also get some Google+ integration, since Google is now trying to push its new social network into all of its services. Siegler also notes that, while Google hasn’t had the best track record with its iPhone apps (though I still give the company credit for supporting other platforms, unlike Apple), this one is shaping up to be killer.

And when the native Gmail app is released, Android users will have one less feature they can lord over iPhone owners (strangely, Gmail is still separate from the native mail app on Android). Together with Apple’s recent acquisition of C3 Technologies – which will allow the company to overhaul its mobile maps apps to feature cool 3D buildings like the Google Maps app on Android — it seems like Apple is making some big strides towards filling in the few gaps where it lags behind Google.

As smartphones continue their exponential growth and consumers get increasingly comfortable with using them to book travel, conduct research and make purchases, it’s essential for organizations to leverage next-generation mobile technologies into their overall marketing efforts.

A comprehensive mobile strategy that incorporates advanced HTML5 mobile Web capabilities, while simultaneously maximizing their reach with a native application strategy is essential for companies hoping to secure brand loyalty.

That’s a tall order, but it’s one that will help you win in the mobile field, which is increasingly becoming crucial to businesses.

Up first: Leveraging HTML5 to reach users. The advancements of HTML5 mobile development provides businesses with a reliable mobile Web platform that delivers faster speeds and more flexibility on next-generation broadband networks. By leveraging advanced features supported by HTML5, you can deliver an app-like experience without forcing people to hunt through an app store, then download the software. Further, HTML5 sites are search engine friendly, potentially increasing your exposure.

There are a few key HTML5-enabled features you’ll need to leverage to enhance the consumer browsing experience:

• Dynamic scrolling banners provide brands with the ability to further target mobile users with the latest products, special offers and relevant promotions on the mobile homepage
• Expanding navigation, collapsible menus and pop-up windows can improve site navigation and allow more content to be incorporated – maximizing the smartphone’s small screen design without sacrificing crucial page download time
• High-resolution image galleries display multiple, high quality product images in a gallery format; and allows users to scroll, swipe and zoom in on a selected image
• Advanced GPS functionality can customize the mobile site experience to where the user is located. A great example is Expedia, a company that delivers mobile search results and hotel room availability based on the user’s location
• Predictive Search can cut down the time it takes for users to access search results on a branded mobile page – similar to the way Google delivers its search results
• Mini-Carts on transactional mobile sites allows users to easily call up their shopping cart at any time to see what’s in their basket, without having to navigate away from the page that they’re on

Using HTML5 doesn’t mean you should ignore traditional apps, though. These can offer consumers a more personalized mobile experience. Because there is a customer discovery element, though, it’s best to view them as a tool to more deeply engage your most faithful customers.

By complementing your mobile Web strategy with native apps, you can encourage customers to become evangelists for your brand. Since mobile apps provide the ability to leverage smartphones’ unique capabilities, they are able to deliver unique interactive features. Examples include:

• Leveraging the smartphone’s camera: The smartphone’s camera can be used in-app to deliver experiences not available in the mobile browser, like providing the ability to read QR and other bar codes. Integrating QR Codes into a mobile app strategy allows brands to implement innovative new marketing and advertising options and deliver unique, exclusive content to consumers.
• Push notifications: This ensures you remain in direct contact with your most loyal customers through an open line of communication. In addition, push notifications provide another unique broadcast platform to disseminate targeted promotions and other branded news.
• Deliver unique, brand-appropriate experiences: The mobile application format presents brands with the opportunity to deliver unique, engaging features to their most loyal customers that are not available in the mobile Web experience. For example, Pacific Sunwear’s iPhone app features an ‘Outfit Builder’ that allows users to piece together a complete outfit from apparel available in PacSun’s inventory.  

As mobile and marketing experts continue to debate the advantages of HTML5 mobile web versus the mobile app, it is time for brands to view these mobile tools not as competing entities, but rather as complimentary pieces to develop the most comprehensive and effective mobile strategy possible. By leveraging both, you’ll more effectively engage with your consumers.

About the author: Jason Taylor is the vice president of Platform Strategy atUsablenet, a global technology leader in multichannel customer engagement. The company works with 20% of Fortune 1000 clients including FedEx, Macy’s, JCPenney, Estée Lauder, Hilton, Delta, Victoria’s Secret and others. Follow@Usablenet on Twitter.

Hybrid app development employs native capabilities while also serving as a strategic stepping stone towards adoption of HTML5.

A hybrid app is a native, downloadable app, that runs all or some of its user interface in an embedded browser component. To the user, a hybrid app is almost indistinguishable from a native one: it is downloaded from the app store or marketplace, it is stored on the device, and it is launched just like any other app. But to developers there is a huge difference, because instead of rewriting the app from scratch for each mobile OS, they write at least some of their application code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and reuse it across devices.

The term “hybrid” actually spans a wide range of possibilities. Some apps, like the Bank of America, Facebook and Yelp iPhone apps, simply load some pages from their web site as part of the app. Other apps, like the Tower Madness game, include a few embedded pages that are written in HTML. But there are other apps, like Harmonius (a graphical sketchpad) or Logitec’s Squeezebox Controller that have their entire UI implemented in HTML.

From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to adopt HTML5 as early as possible. Industry heavyweights have pointed to HTML as the only viable cross-platform technology. Add the rumors about Facebook’s “Project Spartan” (believed to be an app store for HTML5-based mobile web apps), and Microsoft’s announcement that developers will be able to use HTML5 and JavaScript to create applications for the touch-friendly Windows 8, and it almost becomes just a question of “when” companies will adopt HTML for app development rather than “if”.

A primary reason that many companies are not already jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon is the belief that HTML apps cannot access native device features. Indeed, pure mobile web apps (i.e., those that run in the browser – not hybrid ones) are currently restricted in their access to features such as the camera, microphone, address book, and so forth. And while there is work in progress at the W3C to allow web apps to access such device services, mobile browsers do not currently provide such functionality – a key requirement for many innovative mobile apps.

But in the world of hybrid apps, frameworks such as the open source PhoneGap library make it possible for JavaScript code to query the compass, take pictures, find or create contacts and appointments, and tap many other device features that mobile web apps are barred from accessing.

Access to device features is not the only difference between hybrid apps and mobile web apps. Another important difference is that hybrid apps are mostly distributed through app stores: You don’t browse to a hybrid app – you download and install it.

Also, HTML pages of a hybrid app can be transmitted by a web server, but that’s not a requirement. To improve performance, hybrid apps can include a bundled copy of all required web resources (i.e., HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images) so that users will get instant access to them, without having to wait for a web server to send them over.

Differences aside, hybrid apps share some traits with mobile web apps. Unlike pure native apps, which make direct use of the graphics APIs and UI services provided by the operating system, in hybrid apps, most pages are executed by the rendering engine of a browser – much like they are in web apps. This means that, currently, only natively coded pages can achieve game-quality graphics, and although this is less relevant for business apps, you probably won’t be seeing the likes of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 written in HTML for mobile devices anytime soon.

Fortunately, the leading smartphones and tablets have very powerful HTML rendering engines, which already support most of the upcoming HTML5 and CSS3 standards.

JavaScript toolkits like Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile and dojox.mobile are fully compatible with the hybrid app development model, making it easier to achieve a look and feel that is often indistinguishable from native. As a result, hybrid apps running on mobile devices with reasonably modern hardware can achieve highly interactive and impressive user interfaces using just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

For those cases where your app does require special graphics or system-level interaction that cannot be achieved with HTML, hybrid apps can combine web pages with native ones. One interesting hybrid example is an app by Korean credit card Lotte (pictured below), which has 100 pages written in HTML (reused between Android and iPhone), along with a small number of native pages that implement an augmented reality feature.

Other organizations are developing hybrid apps, while planning to turn them into HTML5 web apps in the future without having to rewrite them from scratch.

From a strategic point of view, development organizations should seriously consider adopting HTML for mobile app development sooner rather than later. The hybrid app model, although not suitable for all app development needs, provides a cost-effective solution for a very wide range of downloadable app types and allows gradual entry into the new world of HTML5 while future-proofing your investment.

Ron Perry is chief technology officer at Worklight, a leading HTML5, hybrid and native platform for smartphone and tablet applications.

The application, dubbed Project Spartan, won’t be the first case of a popular tech company going around Apple’s limitations by building a web-only app. Google’s already covered that ground well with its Gmail, Docs, and Maps HTML5 apps. Other notable companies that have decided to work around Apple include the Financial Times and Playboy, which have both released web-optimized HTML5 apps that allow users to subscribe to their content.

The most interesting part of Project Spartan is that “80 or so” third-party developers, including FarmVille and CityVille publisher Zynga, are working with Facebook on it, according to the TechCrunch report. In theory, Facebook members would be able to open Facebook through mobile Safari and then access a collection of games and applications. So Facebook would have its own application offerings tailored for Safari—paid and unpaid—that could run from the web and not have to pay Apple a dime.

If the report is accurate, Facebook’s Spartan could change how companies pursue app development. If it’s ultimately more profitable to build a web app that can charge subscriptions or offer other types of content that Apple won’t allow, developers will move in that direction. Another important reason developers could move to HTML5 is that web apps are easier to maintain and update than apps tailored for a specific device, as you don’t have to wait for a user to download the latest software update.

Yesterday, it was reported Facebook was working on another big project—a photo-sharing iPhone application that aims to beat other photo apps. Nearly 6 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each month, so it seems completely reasonable for the company to be exploring its options with photos.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The success of downloadable smartphone apps will continue at least through the next five years. A new study from ABI Research estimates that app industry will achieve 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016.

If the forecast is correct, it means that native apps will still rule over HTML5 and other new web programming technologies for websites in the browser. At least in the near future.

The latest figures from vendors suggest that the cumulative download number is now around 15-16 billion. Not surprisingly, the two biggest sources for downloadable apps are Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market. Apple announced on January that its App Store has now crossed 10 billion downloads of both free and paid apps. Android Market estimates that users have downloaded 4.2 billion apps so far. http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx. The numbers are quite impressive –- Apple’s App Store and the Android Market have been around less than three years. The App Store opened on June 10, 2008 and Android Market on October 22, 2008.

Right now there are around 350,000 apps in Apple’s App Store and 330,000 apps in Android Market. Nokia’s Ovi Store has 54,000 apps, RIM’s App World 16,000 applications and Windows Marketplace 15,000 downloadable applications.

Apple will face increasing competition from Android and Windows Phone 7. According to ABI Research, the competitors are steadily catching up with Apple as adoption picks up pace and expansion of their mobile OS installed bases continues to grow. The mobile app ecosystem and market model is also expected to evolve with the increasing pool of smartphone and tablet users.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Will HTML5 or native apps lead the charge for the superphone platform? Or is the conflict between the two simply getting overblown?

Today at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit, we tried to suss out the many aspects of the HTML5 and native mobile app debate by gathering some talented minds to discuss the issue, including Peter Relan, the founder of YouWeb; Asokan Thiyagarajan, platforms director at Samsung; and Sayeed Choudhury, director of product management and web technologies at Qualcomm.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, who has written at length about why he thinks HTML5 apps spell doom for native apps, facilitated the discussion, which was also open to plenty of input from the audience.

Due to the open and wide-ranging nature of the conversation, it’s simpler for me to offer a few notable highlights:
- Choudhury made it clear that he abhors the term “superphone” because it diminishes the impact of the progress happening on smartphones. Sure, new dual-core (and next year quad-core) CPU phones will introduce entirely new levels of speed, but existing phones are also seeing tons of speed improvements as companies like Qualcomm and Google become better attuned to the intricacies of mobile hardware. Choudhury pointed to Javascript performance on Android phones, which increased five-fold between 2009 and 2010.

- Choudhury also mentioned that Qualcomm has historically been a company that is all about focusing performance on native apps. But now the company can’t ignore the importance of the web browser, both for general browsing and HTML5 apps.

- A Mozilla developer in the audience said that there really is no controversy, and that HTML5 won’t end up killing native apps. Instead, he views HTML5 as simply another tool that will help developers out. Native apps will continue to have their place since they will likely always have access to more extensive graphics and hardware capabilities compared to HTML5-driven apps.

- The panel pointed to LG’s Optimus Android smartphone, which is inexpensive but offers incredibly fast web browsing performance. Having good support for similar mid-range and low-end devices may be something that will compel developers to stick with HTML5 apps.

- Relan said he wished more developers would rely on the cloud, something that could open up all sorts of new innovation for both native and mobile apps. By relying on the cloud, developers wouldn’t have to worry about the Javascript or processing performance of a user’s phone. As one potential example, he said that it could eventually allow for mobile OS virtualization that could let anybody run Android apps on their iPhone, or vice versa.

- Relan also takes a pragmatic approach to mobile development. His main concern today is how you developers can combine HTML5 with native performance.

By the end of the panel, there definitely didn’t seem to be a clear winner between HTML5 and native apps. Instead, the future looks more nuanced, with HTML5 apps becoming popular, but never quite killing native apps completely.

Perhaps in the end, there really isn’t any major storm brewing between the two, and we should all just shut up and play Angry Birds.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Editor’s note: This discussion about the superphone app platform is one of the five themes we will be focusing on at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit, on April 25-26. We’ve carefully invited the top executives in mobile to discuss the biggest challenges of the day, which, if solved, can lead to much faster growth in the industry. And at our discussion about HTML5 versus native, we’ll have top executives around the table, including Facebook, Google, Verizon, Sencha, AT&T and more.

With Android and other devices eroding the once monolithic iOS mobile app market, many developers face the costly prospect of developing for multiple mobile platforms. This, in turn, has led to a resurgence of the web vs. native debate that VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall clearly outlined in a post several days ago.

The debate is personal for me, since I created the open source mobile web application development framework SproutCore while on the MobileMe team at Apple, a framework that lets you build mobile web apps that have many of the benefits and none of the problems of platform-specific apps.

So I’m here today to say that the debate is over: The web will win, but it won’t be the web of 2005. The iPhone and other mobile devices have forever changed the way users perceive software. iPhone apps have a user interface you can touch. They use hardware acceleration. They work offline.

Traditional web apps do none of this – which is why you see so many developers gravitating towards native technologies today despite the fact that mobile web browsers are also some of the most powerful the world has ever seen.

The problem isn’t the browser; it’s the apps. Most web apps in existence today were designed for a PC era. They were built for a world of mice, high speed internet, and legacy web browsers (like IE6). Mobile devices are just the opposite; touch-based with powerful web browsers, but often used on slow and unreliable 3G.

This change in context is dramatic. Some things that were fast now seem slow. Other things that were impossible are now easy. Even newer web apps, built using techniques that were cutting edge three years ago today, feel old and obsolete when compared to what today’s technology makes possible.

We need to build a new web experience that embraces all the benefits of native without trying to copy it: touch and gesture-driven interface, lightning fast speed, integration with next-generation web browsers. And we need to improve upon the native experience and build in functionality that makes true multi-device deployment possible: persistent data store, automatic data synchronization across platforms, easy deployment to multiple devices, built-in discoverability and the ability to work off-line.

Today’s mobile app developers are faced with two bad choices: 1) They can either build native apps, which are increasingly expensive and hard to manage due to the proliferation of mobile platforms in the market. 2) They can use today’s web development approaches, which basically force them to try to mimic the native experience in a way that doesn’t deliver a positive consumer experience.

But, as I’ve said, there’s also SproutCore, the first web application development framework available today that lets you build web apps that deliver the user experience typically associated with native apps. At my new company – Strobe Inc. – we have a team of developers with a long history of building easy-to-use web platforms, like Ruby on Rails, who are now actively enhancing SproutCore to make it easier to use, more powerful, and available on more platforms.

We have a long way to go until the web sees its final victory. The next few years will be a wild ride for developers and users alike. SproutCore is a solid start on this vision and the best way available today to place your bet on the web to win.

Charles Jolley is a co-founder and CEO of Strobe, a software and cloud services company focused on the mobile web. He is also the creator of the SproutCore open source framework. Before founding Strobe, Charles was responsible for MobileMe application development at Apple.

Is another Black Ops map pack coming May 3? — The launch details for the second blockbuster Call of Duty Black Ops map pack may have been leaked, thanks to a retailer error.

IBM researchers create nanomedicine to kill bacteria where antibiotics fail — IBM and a research group in Singapore have engineered a new kind of synthetic, biodegradable nano particle that could be used to attack bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics.

Hacktivist group Anonymous launches “payback” cyber attack on Sony — The attack is considered part of Operation Payback, a series of attacks that included denial of service attacks against companies that had disowned WikiLeaks after it angered the U.S. government.

How HTML5 will kill the native app — Evangelists say the HTML5 movement has so much momentum that it could defeat the native app — an application that is designed to run on a single platform — in as little as two years.

Leaked iPod Touch with capacitive home button may point to iPhone 5 — Blurry photos of a potentially leaked iPod Touch model hit the Internet Tuesday sporting a touch-sensitive home button and metal back.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Larry Page reorgs Google, ties bonuses to social success — New Google CEO Larry Page, who took up the position on Monday, isn’t wasting any time.

Cocoon promises a safe, spam-free, private way to browse the web — Imagine browsing the web without having to worry about viruses, spam, and spyware.

500 Startups plans a fund that’s all about designers — People in Silicon Valley like to talk about the importance of design, but now incubator and early-stage investment fund 500 Startups is creating a new fund around that idea.

Indie darling Minecraft creator: release games before they’re finished — The Zynga way — releasing games mid-production and updating them as time goes on — is the way to go for independent game developers, according to Minecraft creator Markus Persson.

Only two women make 2011 Forbes Midas List — Forbes’ most recent Midas List is a sober reminder that while women make up the majority of the U.S. workforce and U.S. management positions, they remain woefully underrepresented in the world of venture capital.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Over the past two decades, the mobile industry has become increasingly stunted by fragmented protocols, standards, and regional differences. But a hot new technology called HTML5 promises to remedy this by delivering an unprecedented open, democratic and wonderfully fertile mobile web.

Evangelists say the HTML5 movement has so much momentum that it could defeat the native app — an application that is designed to run on a single platform — in as little as two years.

Sundar Pichai, who leads Google’s HTML5-happy Chrome OS initiative,  agrees that the “incredible advantages of the Web will prevail” over the dominant native app model. Another mobile developer expert Mike Rowehl adds: “We’ll forget that we even passed through another era of native apps on the way to the mobile web.”

The transition comes at a time when the mobile revolution is driving economic growth in the US and abroad. Phones are quickly become our second brain, and users are snapping up the smartest phones they can find. Companies, large and small, are investing billions of dollars to create a smartphone presence.

HTML5 heralds huge efficiencies for web publishers, because it lets companies develop once and distribute across any device via an Internet browser. An HTML5 triumph will not only save billions in development costs, but it will also allow publishers to direct those savings towards more innovative, productive projects.

HTML5 apps are searchable by crawlers such as Google’s search engine, ensuring that the apps can be discovered by billions of consumers. They can mash content with data or apps from third parties, and access analytical services such as traffic measurement tools, and ad server targeting technologies. You don’t need to get anyone’s permission to distribute an HTML5 app. And to top it off, at least one study says consumers prefer the convenience of them (though the research was commissioned by Adobe, which is partial to web apps).

HTML5 is so-called because it is the fifth generation of HyperText Markup Language, which is the coding language used to create web pages. By distributing over a web browser via fast, new mobile networks, HTML5 gets to bypass much of a phone’s underlying “iron,” or the chips, graphical cards and other components — all things that native apps rely on. Most phones being sold today have modern browsers that will operate on super fast 4g or LTE networks — the sort of thing that the HTML5 technology needs to thrive. Thus, as HTML5 advances (developers are working hard to improve it), companies will no longer need to build native apps.

So there’s tremendous logic behind HTML5’s onslaught. Opponents, of course, say it’s not an assured victory. HTML5 has some limitations on things like speed, and access to certain phone features such as bluetooth. What happens over the next 12 months, however, will say a lot about its chances. Its destiny primarily depends on the next steps by Apple, the biggest proponent of native apps, and thus the antagonist of this story. And  precisely because no one knows how this will play out that makes this drama so riveting: Apple is like the Joker in the Dark Knight, a fiend with flair and with a knack for eternal comebacks, while Batman (Google) works to keep the mobile metropolis safe.

(This debate about the emergence of HTML5, and its promise of a future beyond fragmented native app platforms is the focus of one of the sessions at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit April 25/26, a conference for the 180 executives active in transforming the mobile industry. Folks like Google’s Pichai, will be in attendance, as will the major carriers and CEOs of the most disruptive private companies.)

The story started in 2007, with the release of the first iPhone. Led by its enigmatic leader Steve Jobs, Apple gave developers their first real taste of independence from the carrier oligarchy. The iPhone’s beauty was manifold, but first and foremost, it allowed developers to build applications and sell them for a fee — to users who could conveniently tap their iTunes account to buy things through the iPhone’s App Store. This bypassed the control of the carriers, which had long dictated what phones featured on their “decks.”

By the time the dust began to settle, Apple had stolen a two-year lead. Not only that, millions of developers have invested in learning Objective-C, Apple’s programming language for the iPhone, and other developer tools; these developers become specialists with vested interest to stay loyal to Apple. Now, well into 2011, Apple keeps pushing efforts to make native apps more attractive than HTML5 web ones, in an effort to keep those millions of developers — and thus users — hostage.

And so paradoxically, Apple has turned out to be controlling, closed and manipulative. It has no incentive to push to full democracy on the web front. It is enjoys huge profits from its position, not only because it gets a 30 percent cut of the revenue from downloaded apps, but because its phones, and now iPads, are selling like crazy. It is now one of the most valuable companies in the world. At every turn, it seems, Apple finds a way to hamper or limit the features that allow HTML5 to work efficiently on its devices. It remains to be seen what tricks it has up its sleeve going forward, but it’s true that many people think Apple will be be able to stay ahead. There are so many areas where Apple and other companies have hived off their own platforms from the Web that Wired last year declared that the “Web is dead.”

But if you look closely, despite the Apple/Joker’s continued pranks to keep native app alive, you’ll see how much Google/Batman keeps closing the gap on him. The following are the areas where native app gained a quick advantage over HTML5. Note that in almost all areas HTMl5 has caught up. In several areas, HTML is about to catch up. In a few areas, HTML5 has a plan to catch up, but is admittedly at least a year or two away from doing so:

• Touch/gestural interfaces — Gestural technology has been implemented by HTML5 framework vendors, such as Sencha. UI components that are controlled by  touch and swipe, such as carousels, scrolling lists, disclosure panels and related widgets are all supported on the HTML5 web. Vendors like Sencha are also helping get rid of things like back buttons, refresh buttons, passed links, bookmarks and other “anachronistic” features of the desktop web that don’t translate well onto the mobile web. Thus coding time has been cut down too.
• Visual Scale — There’s nothing here that HTML5 can’t address. The web page now has sufficient ways to ask what size screen its on, and size images and resolutions accordingly.
• Video/Audio — Now addressed by HTML5 for sustained playback. Audio synchronization for short sound effects still needs work in the browsers.
• Graphics & FX — Native apps are faster for some operations – particularly anything very graphics-intensive. Graphic-intensive games won’t render as effectively in HTML5 anytime soon. However, increasingly, vendors like Sencha are working around many of the speed issues by doing things like embedding a map component that can be primed for loading maps — addressing the slowness you’ve seen in things like Google maps or other sites.
• Camera/Video access — HTML5 can handle photo capture from a web page on Android devices (at least on the latest versions, run by the Honeycomb OS; but it can’t handle it on iPhones yet).
• Contacts access — Here, HTML5 addresses file access, but most apps are beginning to draw from the cloud anyway, and not from the device client.
• Accelerometer access – HTML5 can handle this.
• Bluetooth access — This is one device access feature HTML5 has not addressed yet. That said, even for native apps, bluetooth access is fairly limited
• Disconnected Operation — Web apps through HTML5 can now work in disconnected mode; you can get up to 50MB of database space if you ask user permission, in order to keep operating without an internet connection.
• App Store Services (discovery, updates, payments & trust) — Not only can HTML5 apps be sold through HTML5 or Chrome app stores, they can be sold directly through Apple’s App Store, Android Marketplace or Blackberry App World, after being placed in a simple “native” app shell such as Nimblekit or Webworks.
• Running in the background and sending notifications – There are HTML5 specs for these capabilities, but they haven’t been implemented in the leading browsers yet. When placed in a native wrapper, HTML5 can do this, but it still means it can’t do this without extra help.
• Business model – Ad revenue works well on HTML5, since the mobile web already has ad networks.  But ads aren’t doing as well on mobile as many expected, so other monetization methods are necessary, such as payment technologies for subscriptions or virtual goods. For HTML5, there are PayPal and Google APIs, but the experience isn’t very good. Lately, however, companies like Zong and Boku are making payments dead simple for the mobile web.

To conclude, native apps are still extremely popular for many developers, because HTML5 is still working to close the performance gap. Take Trulia, the company that offers real estate information online. It’s not a game company, and so theoretically doesn’t need the blazing speed offered by a phone’s underlying chip iron. Still, mobile is a significant portion of the company’s traffic (20 percent and growing) and it’s map-heavy– and HTML5 can’t handle the intensity of map graphics as well as native can.

Chief executive Pete Flint told me he hired ten developers to make native apps, and those apps have shown far superior engagement and page views, he says. “As a brand publisher, I’m loathe to create native apps,” he told me, “it just adds massive overhead.” Indeed, those developers need to learn specific skills to building native mobile apps, arguably having nothing to do with his core business. They have to learn the different programming code, simulators and tech capabilities of each platform, and of each version of the platform. By diverting so much money into this, he’s having to forgo investment in other core innovation. (do the back-of-the-envelope math: at least $100,000 per developer, or a total $1 million investment). In an ideal world, Flint says, he’d have embraced the evolution to HTML5 Web apps — but HTML5 is just not there yet.

But HTML5 will emerge competitive on just about every level within two years, says Michael Mullany, VP of marketing and products at Sencha, adding that already 95 percent of the functionality of native apps is being delivered by HTML5. And if you have any doubts about this, he points to the story already played out on the PC web. For at least 15 years, developers have been able to create “better apps” on the Windows PC desktop, compared to what they can do on a web browser. “But when was the last killer Windows native app developed?,” Mullany asks. It was probably Microsoft Outlook, which came out in 1998, he says. “Native has always had a performance advantage on the desktop,” he says, “but it hasn’t mattered because of the other benefits of being on the web.”

HTML5 graphics performance for fast-moving games that have a lot of animation can’t match native’s performance, and probably won’t for some time to come. But for pretty much anything else, HTML5 is good enough, an increasing number of developers are saying (see this great review by Redfin’s Sasha Aickin). The benefits gained from a slightly faster native experience will be so marginal for the vast majority of apps that it just wont’t matter enough to forgo the considerable benefits of the open web.

Things are moving very quickly. In just the past month or so, HTML5 has shown momentum in other areas: The main browsers, from Chrome to Firefox to Explorer have bolstered their support of the web framework. Facebook, one of the fastest growing companies, and most popular companies in mobile, has largely embraced HTML5, but is expected to say more soon at its f8 conference. Enterprise players are realizing its advantages, too. Slow to embrace the smartphone native app, they’re now balking at the cost of developing those apps, especially now that Microsoft-Nokia is offering yet another compelling alternative to iOS, Android (we’ll talk another time about how Google is like Two-Face, sometimes), Palm’s WebOS and RIM — why even deal with the splintered distribution each each app would have? After all, many companies have already spent decades developing web apps for the PC, and so they don’t want to start over with native mobile apps. So some enterprise companies are embracing HTML5 apps instead. Sencha says it saw its business double last year, largely because of this trend. Finally, publishers are getting pissed off at Apple’s insistence to retain 30 percent of the revenue from apps sold through it’s store.

This story is still in suspense stage: We just don’t know when it will end, but we do know it will end. The logic behind HTML5 is just too compelling for native to win, but at the same time we just don’t now how many more tricks the Joker has up his sleeves to stave off this inevitable tidal shift to an open, democratic metropolis.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook may be the most-downloaded free application on the iPhone, but today the company’s chief technology officer Bret Taylor seemed more excited about the opportunities offered by the mobile Web and HTML5.

Taylor was speaking today at the Inside Social Apps InFocus conference in San Francisco (he’s pictured above at Facebook’s f8 conference last year), where he said that mobile will be the “primary focus” of the Facebook platform team this year. Facebook has said for a while now that it wants to be the “social layer” in all mobile applications, and while Taylor acknowledged that Facebook could still do more on that front, he highlighted improvements Facebook has made recently, particularly the single sign-on feature that it announced in November.

Moving forward, Taylor said that Facebook has been feeling some pain in supporting so many different platforms. If the company wants to roll out a new feature, it has to add it on Facebook.com, across its various mobile and tablet websites, and across its multiple mobile applications. And if that’s a problem for Facebook, it’s also a problem for any other developer.

“Over the long term, most people really view HTML5 as the future platform that we’re going to be looking to,” Taylor said. He said that tech companies in Silicon Valley are probably a little ahead of the reality in their focus on HTML5, but HTML5 products are going to be “a huge amount of our investment over the next year”, not just spending on Facebook itself but also on developer tools.

The debate about the advantages of HTML5 (the latest version of the basic format of the Web) versus native apps is one that’s been going on for a while, and to be clear Taylor didn’t sound like he was coming down definitively on one side or the other. But it still seems significant that he was so pro-HTML5, since Facebook has had such success on the native side, and since Facebook’s former iPhone developer famously went on a rant about the limitations of HTML5.

Taylor didn’t just talk about mobile. He said that in 2010, Facebook’s main focus for the platform was on the user experience, and that the team succeeded in cutting back spam in users’ newsfeeds and messages by 95 percent. This year the company is turning its attention to growth. He cited Zynga’s game CityVille, which reached 100 million users in 43 days, as an example of how quickly an app can grow now.