About 18 months ago I got my first Android phone. One of the first applications I downloaded on it was for Facebook. It had some quirks but it worked fine.
Not long after I was prompted to ‘upgrade’ to the next version, which I duly did.
The supposed upgrade was (and is) a disaster. Slow, difficult to understand, a mess.
I had always wondered why Facebook had not simply rolled back the upgrade and tried again. But now I know. To cut their costs they had based their iOS and Android applications on a common HTML5 core. A common code base eliminated the need to maintain two separate blocks of complex code, presumably with two sets of developers.
But it didn’t work. By all accounts the iOS version made the Android one look slick and this week it was axed in favour of an Objective C based application. Hopefully a Java based Android replacement is also in the works.
But I suspect sloth will be the least of HTML5’s problems. Turning mark up into executable code just sounds like a recipe for trouble and it’s only just started.
Related articles
- Facebook doubles iPhone app speed by dumping HTML5 for native code (guardian.co.uk)
- Facebook finally fixes its freakishly slow iOS app (gigaom.com)
- Facebook for iOS goes native, waves goodbye to HTML 5 (theverge.com)
- Facebook: A Blow To HTML5 (branch.com)
- Native Apps vs. HTML5: The Smoking Gun by DROdio (danielodio.com)
- Facebook recodes iOS mobile app (bbc.co.uk)
- Mark Zuckerberg reportedly forcing Facebook’s Android team to use app and see how bad it is (phandroid.com)
- Facebook Is Making Its Employees Use Android Phones To See Just How Awful Its Mobile App Is (androidpolice.com)
- Facebook’s iPhone App is New, Improved; Android, Not So Much (pcworld.com)
I’m not a fan of this app thing. The more that can be done by web sites, the fewer apps I need. Cross-platform is an important attribute: it reduces the winner-take-all nature of the platform wars. Of course Adobe Flash had its own pathologies and I’m not sad to see it go. I hope HTML5 grows up well and quickly.