State of the Mobile Web

A SkillsCast for this session is not available.

In the world of mobile app development, web apps have seemed like an annoying younger sibling: always nagging for attention but not really grown-up enough to play with the big kids. However, just like a real kid-brother or sister, mobile web apps have grown up in recent years. For certain classes of application they now represent a viable proposition, and can even be superior in some circumstances.

The goal of this presentation is to give attendees an accurate picture of the current state of mobile web development, especially in relation to the native app development world. Attendees will learn what’s possible with the mobile web today, and when it might be preferable to use web technologies to build a mobile app instead of writing it natively. They’ll also learn best-practices in mobile web development, when and how frameworks can help, and when it’s appropriate to build a hybrid app that uses both native and web technologies.

I’ll start with a summary of the current state of mobile web development, talking about how advances in both hardware and web standards over the last couple of years are now enabling a whole new class of mobile web application.

Next I’ll move onto guidelines for when to go native and when to go web. This will include coverage of the limitations of Javascript, CSS3, and mobile browsers in general. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of distributing an app over the web vs an app store. Finally, we’ll compare the development effort of native vs. web development.

After that I’ll talk about best practices in mobile app development. This will include a discussion about single-page web apps and their associated frameworks, minimising download and startup times, reducing latency during user interactions, and maximising animation performance.

Finally, I’ll discuss when a hybrid approach (i.e. a web app within a native app) can be useful, from both an app-distribution and hardware-access perspective. This will include a discussion of when a wrapper framework (for example, Phonegap) can be useful, as opposed to just doing it all yourself.

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