Wondering what’s the best way to build enterprise mobile apps? Should you go native or instead use HTML to build them? There’s been a lot of debate about it since the introduction of HTML5 two years ago, but now most people agree: HTML5 is the way to go for mobile app development. Here are four reasons why.
You can write once and deploy everywhere
Writing native apps is expensive and time-consuming. Developers with skills for writing native apps are in short supply. They also charge top dollar. Apps need constant maintenance and bug-fixing, so they need to be updated regularly. That means high ongoing costs. If you need native apps built for the two major platforms, the expense is doubled. Add in the expensive of hiring developers to building a mobile Web site, and that triples your expenses.
With HTML5, none of that is necessary. Build the app once using HTML5 and you can deploy it to any mobile device, and to the web. As Jack Madden says in his blog titled Why HTML5 apps are ideal for enterprise mobility, “The ability to customize the interface and ‘write once, deploy anywhere’ means that HTML5 can be ideal for employee-facing mobile apps.”
HTML5 is ideal for mobile
HTML5 was written with mobile in mind, and has plenty of features that developers can tap into. HTML5 can take advantage of geolocation, motion sensors, virtual keyboards, and touch events. It plays multimedia without requiring plug-ins. It gives developers a great deal of control over how graphics display.
HTML5 is constantly updated with new mobile features
Several months ago, the HTML5.1 standard was released, and it includes new features for mobile. Notably, it introduced the srcset image attribute. This lets developers write an app in which the browser can select among different images to send to users based on the speed of their connection. So a developer can write an app that will deliver lower-resolution images to mobile users on slow networks, and higher-resolution images to users on fast networks. And end-users love great performing apps.
You can build and update quickly
HTML5 is simpler to use than the tools required to build native apps, so its takes less time to build apps from scratch, and less time to update them. But that’s only the start of why HTML5 makes it easy to build and update apps. With HTML5, you only have to maintain a single codebase and then deploy it to multiple platforms. That’s a tremendous time-saver --- and money saver.
Find out how you can built HTML5 apps quickly and deploy them across multiple platforms with Alpha Anywhere and PhoneGap.
Watch a webinar on how to build hybrid mobile apps using Alpha Anywhere and PhoneGap.
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