Native versus HTML5

Where’s mobile programming heading to?

Abstract

The market for mobile applications has grown from a few pre-installed applications on mobile phones to giant stores for
different smartphone platforms. Although for smartphones, Android has a much stronger market share than iOS or
Windows, a developer can hardly refrain from offering its applications for all operating systems. For him this represents a
significant overhead, since the different platforms are addressed with different programming languages. This means
concretely that multiple programming effort, multiple tests and calls for a broad expertise of Java, Objective-C and .NET
are required. Web technologies known as HTML5, allow to develop applications that are running on all mobile operating
systems, without having to be repeatedly developed. Thanks to modern frameworks web technologies are on a level with
native development and the approach needs to be carefully considered. This paper investigates the benefits and risks of
different development approaches with the help of certain criteria.