This article does not seem to be objective and honest. Yes you can monetize an HTML5 app, but there is a difference between can monetize and can monetize and actually make money.
If you are going to criticize app stores, you might want to factor in the reality that Apple has paid out over 6 billion dollars to app developers. The article mentions phone gap, that's true, so that's fine, but I'm addressing the point about monetizing on the web.
This article also is cherry picking news articles. It picks the Financial Time's article but doesn't mention Facebook's switch to native.
The build once, run everywhere point is flawed as we know that you actually do have to test and add various fixes here and there and worry about screen size, poor development environments on mobile and the like. You also do not have to write the vast majority of your app more than once for multiple platforms. I know a featured developer with a game that has more than 7 million users who wrote their game in C++ and were able to port it to both Android and iOS without writing two different games. And really there are only two mobile platforms that users have to worry about, iOS and Android.
Without hard numbers on how easy it is to make a living off apps in the app store and apps on the web, all we're doing here is waving our hands. The few studies I've seen on the matter show that most of the app store income is concentrated into the hands of a select group of developers fortunate enough to have their apps featured in the top 10 for their category. http://www.kontain.com/plat4m/entries/98334/apps-dont-genera...
It also does something that always pisses me off when I see it in HTML5 boosterism, which is claim that HTML and Javascript are plenty performant, and hey look at this demo as proof!
The problem is that the demo is always of a game that would have been impressive over a decade ago! I mean look at the wipeout clone they show a video of! The demo consists of a clone of a game that ran on a PS1 with 33mhz MIPS processor! And the PS1 version appears to have great complexity in its scenery! The only difference is the increased resolution of the Mozilla demo. Now all it takes is a quad-core I7 with 8GB of RAM and the latest Nvidia card to get the exact same experience with a higher-resolution. Take that people who are unimpressed by HTML5!
Javascript and the web are technologies that are popular by virtue of their incredible reach, and not because of the skill and care that have gone into their design. I would really like to Mozilla and other concerned parties spend a lot more time dealing with the glaring deficiencies of the web than trying to convince me they don't exist.
To be fair, that Wipeout clone demo also runs fine at full quality on a Core 2 E6400+8800GT. That's also before noting that on that old rig the demo never went above 20% CPU or GPU, which still says nothing about how well optimized the demo is.
Of course, you're absolutely spot on in that all this is stuff non-web devs were doing over a decade ago, the real benefit of web technologies not being that they're as capable as native solutions, but that they benefit from the web's ubiquity.
Comments
This article does not seem to be objective and honest. Yes you can monetize an HTML5 app, but there is a difference between can monetize and can monetize and actually make money.
If you are going to criticize app stores, you might want to factor in the reality that Apple has paid out over 6 billion dollars to app developers. The article mentions phone gap, that's true, so that's fine, but I'm addressing the point about monetizing on the web.
This article also is cherry picking news articles. It picks the Financial Time's article but doesn't mention Facebook's switch to native.
The build once, run everywhere point is flawed as we know that you actually do have to test and add various fixes here and there and worry about screen size, poor development environments on mobile and the like. You also do not have to write the vast majority of your app more than once for multiple platforms. I know a featured developer with a game that has more than 7 million users who wrote their game in C++ and were able to port it to both Android and iOS without writing two different games. And really there are only two mobile platforms that users have to worry about, iOS and Android.
Without hard numbers on how easy it is to make a living off apps in the app store and apps on the web, all we're doing here is waving our hands. The few studies I've seen on the matter show that most of the app store income is concentrated into the hands of a select group of developers fortunate enough to have their apps featured in the top 10 for their category. http://www.kontain.com/plat4m/entries/98334/apps-dont-genera...
It also does something that always pisses me off when I see it in HTML5 boosterism, which is claim that HTML and Javascript are plenty performant, and hey look at this demo as proof!
The problem is that the demo is always of a game that would have been impressive over a decade ago! I mean look at the wipeout clone they show a video of! The demo consists of a clone of a game that ran on a PS1 with 33mhz MIPS processor! And the PS1 version appears to have great complexity in its scenery! The only difference is the increased resolution of the Mozilla demo. Now all it takes is a quad-core I7 with 8GB of RAM and the latest Nvidia card to get the exact same experience with a higher-resolution. Take that people who are unimpressed by HTML5!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRSVrkzDyuA
Javascript and the web are technologies that are popular by virtue of their incredible reach, and not because of the skill and care that have gone into their design. I would really like to Mozilla and other concerned parties spend a lot more time dealing with the glaring deficiencies of the web than trying to convince me they don't exist.
To be fair, that Wipeout clone demo also runs fine at full quality on a Core 2 E6400+8800GT. That's also before noting that on that old rig the demo never went above 20% CPU or GPU, which still says nothing about how well optimized the demo is.
Of course, you're absolutely spot on in that all this is stuff non-web devs were doing over a decade ago, the real benefit of web technologies not being that they're as capable as native solutions, but that they benefit from the web's ubiquity.