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HTML5 could be the option you're looking for

By Jaco Coetzee, Brainstorm Mobile Solutions MD, South Africa.


Johannesburg, 02 Sep 2013

Smartphones have come a long way since a two-megabyte disk drive was the size of a small car, 40 years ago. Today, these devices provide an unprecedented amount of computing power in your pocket. This power can be used for the latest HTML technology, HTML5, a mark-up language that is changing the digital landscape, allowing quicker creation of content and brand applications. But does HTML5 match the power of native development?

Most smartphones use a Web technology called WebKit, which features rich code to render Web pages and is used in most handsets and supports most of the modern HTML5 standards. This technology is an open source library, which means anyone can take it, use it and build products around it. It provides a common and great way to display Web pages and is used by many smartphones, says Jaco Coetzee, Brainstorm Mobile Solutions MD, South Africa.

The great thing about common technology like this is that an HTML5 application written to run on WebKit will work out of the box with most of the smartphones on the market today. Compatibility issues that plagued early mobile phones are a thing of the past.

In recent years, the HTML standard language used to create Web pages has evolved from simple text-based pages, with a few links and images, to a media capable of fully interactive content.

The latest in these changes is HTML5, which has a huge amount of features, giving marketers the freedom to create spectacular, rich content. More importantly, because WebKit is used on both iOS (iPhone) and Android smartphones, everybody has it.

HTML5 vs native apps

HTML5 is much cheaper and quicker to build than native applications because more people know how to put Web pages together than they do about coding in Objective-C or Java. Additionally, unlike a native application, developers don't have to create an app for each smartphone platform, significantly cutting the development time, which can make going native very expensive.

There are, of course, some benefits to developing a native app. For example, they provide the ability to run offline due to the application remaining installed on the device from the original download, so no Internet connection is required, meaning users get peak performance at all times. They are also easier to monetise; you set a price, and when users buy it, you make money immediately.

However, HTML5 apps don't incur any app store costs, which is particularly significant for iOS apps where Apple takes a 30% slice of revenues from digital products sold through its app store.

Currently, using HTML5 means you're unlikely to get a console game level experience. But HTML5 is a very fast-paced industry at the moment, with new frameworks and devices coming out on an almost daily basis. Indie software houses are being created just to produce HTML5 games and frameworks.

This is an ever-evolving market, and mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful. Creating your campaign using HTML5 is therefore a no-brainer.

There are many important points to bear in mind when developing an HTML5 app. For example, when packaging your Web site, ensure the content is formatted for mobile. Very few mobile apps allow zooming or scaling, therefore sites that do responsive design properly will not need to zoom. You also need to take time to read the development guides from major mobile platform vendors and address their recommendations.

Take care not to abuse mobile Web functionality. People downloading an app expect an app experience, and will feel somewhat ripped off if they are forced to download an app just to get the exact same experience they used to get with a browser, with some features removed.

Embedding HTML5 applications within native applications is becoming more popular and several frameworks have sprung up to aid in this task.

Two of the main players in the space are JQuery.Mobile and PhoneGap, for very different reasons. JQuery.Mobile makes native-looking interfaces in HTML. If you need the look and feel of a native application, but are using HTML, this is the framework for you. It's built on the back of the hugely popular JQuery project and is designed for mobile devices specifically.

PhoneGap has also grown into a powerful tool for building applications quickly. It uses standard HTML5, along with a few custom extensions to get mobile device features like the accelerometer into Web pages.

Having HTML5 in your bag of tricks is a brilliant way to get your message out on a mobile platform quickly and easily. Both native and HTML5 present different offerings and costs in terms of money, time and resources. Ultimately, it's more likely that HTML5, with its cross-platform potential and the fact that it's so commonly used, will win out.

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Editorial contacts

Nono Matuwane
Brainstorm Mobile Solutions
(+27) 84 500 8167