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Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-html5-today/438532093919 https:/

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-html5-today/438532093919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_html5_not_competitive_with_cocoa_touch https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively Just Like The iOS Version" I have always rooted for mobile web apps, but the lack of feature parity and distribution challenge (“Add to Home Screen”) puts them at a constant disadvantage and companies who control mobile OS’s have little incentive to change this.

carlosdp 7y ago
In re: distribution challenge, PWAs can already be published to the Google Play store.
- marvindanig 7y ago
  Yeah, and those are called TWAs-as in Trusted Web Activities. As much as I dislike Google in general, they have been good at bringing web development and native apps closer than ever.
  - rbrtl 7y ago
    I think this is only another reason to dislike them. Google created the PWA as a way to encapsulate the market on their terms. As my other comments will belie me, I do not disapprove of this behaviour necessarily -- Apple do it too -- but they have the polar opposite attitude to my privacy and data protection.
jollins 7y ago
As you said yourself though, this was 10 years ago.
koheripbal 7y ago
It strikes me that, more than anything, it is the lack of an efficient "Add to Home Screen" flow, that has doomed mobile websites. ...and it's intentional. By having an app store, mobile OS distributors know that they have control over a massive revenue stream.
- bostik 7y ago
  A good part of it is their absolutely massive 30% cut. The only reason they get away with it is that when Apple's app store first came out, most of the online casual applications were games. Hosted by a few gargantuan aggregators (cough newgrounds cough) who charged 70%+ of the revenue for their ... service. Against a backdrop of above-criminal-rates extortion, 30% must have looked like a bargain. To put these numbers in context, very good agents get 15%.
  - tombert 7y ago
    Forgive me a bit, since I haven't been on Newgrounds since before the iPhone came out, but did Newgrounds ever charge to host on their site? Did they allow you to monetize your games?
    - grawprog 7y ago
      https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetization https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetizati...
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Most of the money being made on the App Store is for in app consumables from pay to win games. You’ll have to forgive me for not shedding a tear for them. I hope Apple Arcade takes a huge chunk of their revenue. It’s not indy developers trying to make a living. The other types of apps that use to make Apple a lot of money are streaming services. But most of those are now not allowing you to do in app purchases. I’m looking through all of my apps, and I only have two or three that I actually paid money via in app purchases and those were to turn off ads. All of the rest I had to buy subscriptions on the app makers websites or buy content in the case of Amazon for Kindle books.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
GrumpyNl 7y ago
Why does everybody think they have to build at the scale of Fb. Most of the apps will do perfectly fine when they are web based.
protonfish 7y ago
It makes sense that a company with a business model based on mining and selling personal data would not find mobile web to be acceptable - too many privacy and security protections that can be eschewed on native. For the same reasons, consumers should choose HTML.
Steltek 7y ago
Didn't Facebook also want native app access so they could work around OS limits like background processing via shady stuff like leaving the microphone on? I prefer webapps for security reasons because of Facebook's checkered history with native apps.
- scarface74 7y ago
  But what happens if Apple or Google gives web apps more of the capabilities of native apps?
  - fendy3002 7y ago
    I'd really hate it if browsers are capable to run in background and accessing microphone or camera. Especially if the tab is closed.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      Buy why? People use those apps every day and fine with it. Why browser is bad? You'll still need to give your permission to do so anyway.
      - paulryanrogers 7y ago
        I'd say bloat is bad. And as the browser comes to encompass more OS functionality it does so more poorly than the underlying OS could.
      - asutekku 7y ago
        People will leave hundreds of tabs open. It’s just not few apps, it’s the whole internet and knowing people they will most likely just smash through the ”deny/allow” warnings.
reaperducer 7y ago
Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. That was ten years ago. Phones and web sites have changed a lot since 2010. If the battle was re-fought today, I'm not sure the winner would be all that clear.
- vincnetas 7y ago
  You still cant crawl through all the local contacts with mobile HTML app. Contrary to native app. So thats a no go for FB from the start i guess.
globuous 7y ago
[2] is from 2012 though, almost a decade ago. The web has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive. With wasm and webgpu and what not. And as of today, i dont think the mobile web interfaces for fb and messenger are particularly worse than their native counterparts. They save me the notifications actually...
- muxator 7y ago
  The web post-wasm could be a whole different beast from what the web was originally supposed to be. Not that the current situation is idyllic, but I fear a post-wasm web would be even more opaque and less inspectable.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    wasm is not less inspectable than minified JS.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  > The web has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive. The web is always 5 to 10 years away from being competitive. Meanwhile Twitter struggled to implement such a trivial thing as a virtual list on the web: https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN It took them almost a year after the resign to fix most of these issues. While breaking or half-breaking functionality for almost everything else. And that's for a website that's nothing but text and pictures. I wouldn't he my breath waiting for web to be competitive.
doctor_eval 7y ago
Ten years ago, Facebook tried with HTML5 -- and 10 years before that Java tried with Swing and then JavaFX. There has always been this push for a "write once, run anywhere" application development platform - long before it was the mantra of Java in the late 90's, or QT a bit later, or React today. The truth is that the platforms change faster than the cross-platform tools. Swing lost out not because it was horrible to work with, but because they couldn't track changes to the platform fast enough; Swing apps looked dated from the very start. I'm pretty confident this will continue to be the case; HTML apps don't look like native apps unless you do a lot of platform-specific work, and then you maybe would have been better off just building native. In addition to tracking the look, feel and interoperability of the platform, HTML will always be slower than native, simply because there will always be more ways to optimise native apps than HTML apps. In the end, there is no one-size-fits all solution. There will always be classes of application for which HTML is good enough, classes for which a blend of HTML and native will get you though, and classes for which HTML will not be good enough. But I suspect that any sufficiently advanced and popular application will almost always move to native eventually. You just cant't integrate with the platform properly, over the long term, any other way.
- alexsexotic 7y ago
  Did you ever heard of WeChat? The Facebook quivalent of China, which is on its own an operating system serving many miniapps. What's interesting about it it lets other apps access qr scanning and the WeChat wallet for payment.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Is WeChat an example of React Native?
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      I don't think so, but WeChat hosts so called mini programs that are implemented using Web(ish) technologies. There's a million of those mini programs with 750 million monthly active users. So it's an example of successful mobile Web apps if you will.
on_and_off 7y ago
Native Mobile will be replaced by web in x years (where x is usually 2 to 5) has been uttered since day 1 of mobile apps. I tend to skip reading these arguments nowadays unless they start by explaining why it hasn't worked so far and how it will be addressed. edit : also, you can add progressive web apps to the home screen, so this ain't it AFAIK.
Ntrails 7y ago
What if the issue with facebook wasn't HTML5 but rather feature bloat and a focus on Ad placement?
Can_Not 7y ago
I always thought Sencha debunked that: https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-...

carlosdp 7y ago

In re: distribution challenge, PWAs can already be published to the Google Play store.

marvindanig 7y ago
Yeah, and those are called TWAs-as in Trusted Web Activities. As much as I dislike Google in general, they have been good at bringing web development and native apps closer than ever.
- rbrtl 7y ago
  I think this is only another reason to dislike them. Google created the PWA as a way to encapsulate the market on their terms. As my other comments will belie me, I do not disapprove of this behaviour necessarily -- Apple do it too -- but they have the polar opposite attitude to my privacy and data protection.

jollins 7y ago

As you said yourself though, this was 10 years ago.

koheripbal 7y ago

It strikes me that, more than anything, it is the lack of an efficient "Add to Home Screen" flow, that has doomed mobile websites. ...and it's intentional. By having an app store, mobile OS distributors know that they have control over a massive revenue stream.

bostik 7y ago
A good part of it is their absolutely massive 30% cut. The only reason they get away with it is that when Apple's app store first came out, most of the online casual applications were games. Hosted by a few gargantuan aggregators (cough newgrounds cough) who charged 70%+ of the revenue for their ... service. Against a backdrop of above-criminal-rates extortion, 30% must have looked like a bargain. To put these numbers in context, very good agents get 15%.
- tombert 7y ago
  Forgive me a bit, since I haven't been on Newgrounds since before the iPhone came out, but did Newgrounds ever charge to host on their site? Did they allow you to monetize your games?
  - grawprog 7y ago
    https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetization https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/monetizati...
- scarface74 7y ago
  Most of the money being made on the App Store is for in app consumables from pay to win games. You’ll have to forgive me for not shedding a tear for them. I hope Apple Arcade takes a huge chunk of their revenue. It’s not indy developers trying to make a living. The other types of apps that use to make Apple a lot of money are streaming services. But most of those are now not allowing you to do in app purchases. I’m looking through all of my apps, and I only have two or three that I actually paid money via in app purchases and those were to turn off ads. All of the rest I had to buy subscriptions on the app makers websites or buy content in the case of Amazon for Kindle books.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

GrumpyNl 7y ago

Why does everybody think they have to build at the scale of Fb. Most of the apps will do perfectly fine when they are web based.

protonfish 7y ago

It makes sense that a company with a business model based on mining and selling personal data would not find mobile web to be acceptable - too many privacy and security protections that can be eschewed on native. For the same reasons, consumers should choose HTML.

Steltek 7y ago

Didn't Facebook also want native app access so they could work around OS limits like background processing via shady stuff like leaving the microphone on? I prefer webapps for security reasons because of Facebook's checkered history with native apps.

scarface74 7y ago
But what happens if Apple or Google gives web apps more of the capabilities of native apps?
- fendy3002 7y ago
  I'd really hate it if browsers are capable to run in background and accessing microphone or camera. Especially if the tab is closed.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Buy why? People use those apps every day and fine with it. Why browser is bad? You'll still need to give your permission to do so anyway.
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      I'd say bloat is bad. And as the browser comes to encompass more OS functionality it does so more poorly than the underlying OS could.
    - asutekku 7y ago
      People will leave hundreds of tabs open. It’s just not few apps, it’s the whole internet and knowing people they will most likely just smash through the ”deny/allow” warnings.

reaperducer 7y ago

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. That was ten years ago. Phones and web sites have changed a lot since 2010. If the battle was re-fought today, I'm not sure the winner would be all that clear.

vincnetas 7y ago
You still cant crawl through all the local contacts with mobile HTML app. Contrary to native app. So thats a no go for FB from the start i guess.

globuous 7y ago

[2] is from 2012 though, almost a decade ago. The web has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive. With wasm and webgpu and what not. And as of today, i dont think the mobile web interfaces for fb and messenger are particularly worse than their native counterparts. They save me the notifications actually...

muxator 7y ago
The web post-wasm could be a whole different beast from what the web was originally supposed to be. Not that the current situation is idyllic, but I fear a post-wasm web would be even more opaque and less inspectable.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  wasm is not less inspectable than minified JS.
dmitriid 7y ago
> The web has come a long way since, and in five years to a decade could be competitive. The web is always 5 to 10 years away from being competitive. Meanwhile Twitter struggled to implement such a trivial thing as a virtual list on the web: https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN It took them almost a year after the resign to fix most of these issues. While breaking or half-breaking functionality for almost everything else. And that's for a website that's nothing but text and pictures. I wouldn't he my breath waiting for web to be competitive.

doctor_eval 7y ago

Ten years ago, Facebook tried with HTML5 -- and 10 years before that Java tried with Swing and then JavaFX. There has always been this push for a "write once, run anywhere" application development platform - long before it was the mantra of Java in the late 90's, or QT a bit later, or React today. The truth is that the platforms change faster than the cross-platform tools. Swing lost out not because it was horrible to work with, but because they couldn't track changes to the platform fast enough; Swing apps looked dated from the very start. I'm pretty confident this will continue to be the case; HTML apps don't look like native apps unless you do a lot of platform-specific work, and then you maybe would have been better off just building native. In addition to tracking the look, feel and interoperability of the platform, HTML will always be slower than native, simply because there will always be more ways to optimise native apps than HTML apps. In the end, there is no one-size-fits all solution. There will always be classes of application for which HTML is good enough, classes for which a blend of HTML and native will get you though, and classes for which HTML will not be good enough. But I suspect that any sufficiently advanced and popular application will almost always move to native eventually. You just cant't integrate with the platform properly, over the long term, any other way.

alexsexotic 7y ago
Did you ever heard of WeChat? The Facebook quivalent of China, which is on its own an operating system serving many miniapps. What's interesting about it it lets other apps access qr scanning and the WeChat wallet for payment.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Is WeChat an example of React Native?
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I don't think so, but WeChat hosts so called mini programs that are implemented using Web(ish) technologies. There's a million of those mini programs with 750 million monthly active users. So it's an example of successful mobile Web apps if you will.

on_and_off 7y ago

Native Mobile will be replaced by web in x years (where x is usually 2 to 5) has been uttered since day 1 of mobile apps. I tend to skip reading these arguments nowadays unless they start by explaining why it hasn't worked so far and how it will be addressed. edit : also, you can add progressive web apps to the home screen, so this ain't it AFAIK.

Ntrails 7y ago

What if the issue with facebook wasn't HTML5 but rather feature bloat and a focus on Ad placement?

Can_Not 7y ago

I always thought Sencha debunked that: https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story/ https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-...