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"the company had chosen to build its apps predominantly using HTML5 so that it could take advantage of reusing programming code across multiple mobile platforms
by Timothee 14y ago
"the company had chosen to build its apps predominantly using HTML5 so that it could take advantage of reusing programming code across multiple mobile platforms"
This is certainly a benefit, but at Facebook's scale, it made sense to dedicate engineering efforts to have the best experience on the iPhone. I'm glad they're finally going in this direction. However, I think that one of the benefit that is not mention here is the easiness to change the UI at any point, which they've been doing all the time.
That being said, I would think that it would still be possible to modify a native UI without going through an App Store review, since more or less everything can be created and customized programmatically: so you can send some kind of file that describe the UI tweak. Surely, it can become a mess pretty fast, but it's an option.
- marknutter 14y agoThat would violate Apple's terms. Apple allows updating of HTML/JS/CSS without going through the update process but not the updating or changing of any native code.
- Timothee 14y agoI'm not saying changing the native code, but with the same native code building a different interface from some kind of description file that could be updated remotely. Maybe Apple would not be happy about that, but I don't know if they'd be able to tell you're going to do that during the review process.
- reddit_clone 14y agoYou still can not dynamically download anything that needs to be 'interpreted' on the device application. Your 'UI Description' file most likely will fall under that category.
- pohl 14y agoNo, that would be ludicrous. It would be impossible to fill a UITableView with data from a server if that were the case. The rule is really about linking interpreters into an app and then having them run code fetched over the net.
- anuraj 14y agoDon't really understand what you are saying. What prevents you from changing the JSON data that you display within a native screen at any given time? HTML is not the only way to transfer data out there and interpretation is totally upto the app.
- marknutter 14y agoMeaning, you can replace code wholesale so long as it doesn't change the original intention of the app and it's just html/css/js you're changing. So if you're using a javascript framework to build an application, for instance, you could send an update to that app over the web rather than go through the app store update approval process.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]