“When you’re hot,” observed country singer Jerry Reed in the early ‘70s, “you’re hot.” An astute commentator on the human condition, Jerry also found the converse to be true: “When you’re not, you’re not.” On its face, it seems so obvious, right? But sometimes it takes a country song to set us straight on these things.
From the “Be Careful What You Wish For” Department
Can it really have been only a year or so ago that commentators, both in this blog and the mobile development community at large, were complaining about how hard it was to write cross-platform mobile apps, and wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way—any way!—to generate fully native apps for each mobile operating system from a single code base?
For a long time, developers with expertise in the .NET framework have wanted to be able to create compelling, performant web applications that leveraged the rich .NET environment and its easy-to-use programming languages. It wasn’t impossible, but it always seemed more complex than it ought to be—certainly more complex than delivering similar applications in JavaScript or PHP.
First there were the VCR wars (VHS vs. Betamax—look it up if you’re too young to remember). Then there were various game console wars (Atari vs. Intellivision, Sega vs. Nintendo, Xbox vs. PlayStation), browser wars (Mosaic vs. Netscape, Netscape vs. Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer vs. Firefox vs. Chrome…), and mobile platform wars (iOS vs. Android). You’d think that, as a society, we’d be getting tired of these belligerent metaphors. In case we’re not, here’s another one: The cross-platform mobile development framework wars, pitting React Native vs. Xamarin. It’s a bit esoteric to begin with and doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it’s unlikely to become meme fodder. Thankfully.
Ever since iOS and Android established themselves as the two dominant mobile platforms, app developers have had to make a choice: If you’re going to create an app with both Android and iOS versions, which do you work on first? “Both” has never been a viable option, because developing for each platform is sufficiently different that precious little code can be shared between the two. This means that app development takes twice as long as it should, sometimes longer. In an environment where speed to market can determine commercial success or failure, this state of affairs is a major handicap.
From an application-development standpoint, one of the shortcomings of HTML is the fact that it is, first and foremost, a markup language, not a programming language. Although HTML5, the latest version, lends itself more to interactivity than previous versions, it is still mostly about presentation and not so much about applications.
