Arc Tangent

Over on The Men­tal Fac­ulty Blog, Drew McCor­mack expounds on why he thinks native apps are here to stay. He doesn’t see native apps being sec­ond class cit­i­zens at all and his argu­ments are pretty cogent.

I’ll add this to his points though: good luck build­ing a HTML5 replace­ment for an app like Run­k­eeper. If you’ve not famil­iar with it, it’s an app for track­ing your run­ning — it uses the GPS to record your route, cal­cu­late your pace, and gives you updates over the headphones.

I can’t see how this app could be any­thing but native. Sure, you could build a webapp replace­ment that uses javascript to poll the GPS, but if your browser gets back­grounded, you’re not going to get the GPS data (unless, of course, Apple gives you an API to poll the GPS data reg­u­larly in javascript…)

Also: have you ever tried to do any­thing seri­ous with audio in javascript? It’s a mess.

Native Apps still have legs. In the future, we might be able to inte­grate webapps more tightly with our devices, but we’re a long way off giv­ing up on native.