Ask HN: I need to specialize. Web, or iOS?

Re:Ask HN: I need to specialize. Web, or iOS? by bikamonki on Saturday May 07, 2016 @12:59AM (#11648464)

Neither, bots will develop apps in 10 years. Now, assuming AI does not take over our jobs, I'd say it depends on the kind of apps that you develop. The current state of technology allows for web apps to perform very close to native and browsers are ever more willing to let web apps access phone features. However, for some apps like games, image manipulation, etc. native code is a better choice. I am a specialized web developer, I do mostly 'business-type apps' and so far I have managed to run in the phone's browser or on top of a layer like Apache Cordova.

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Re:Ask HN: I need to specialize. Web, or iOS? by esob3 on Saturday May 07, 2016 @01:17AM (#11648488)

So from the sounds of it your vote is:

Web.

And your reasoning is:

Web could replace native Obj-C / Java, on mobile platforms, in the future.

My response is:

That makes sense. I don't have much experience building a mobile app with web technology, but it seems to be more and more common, especially in the startup space (because you can kill 2 birds with one stone).

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Re:Ask HN: I need to specialize. Web, or iOS? by bikamonki on Saturday May 07, 2016 @08:28AM (#11649318)

You kill 4 birds not 2. Your clients/employer will appreciate a single codebase that costs much less, both to develop and maintain.

There are drawbacks though. For instance, Android is very limited when handling images taken from a camera activity which was called by a browser, in fact this is a documented still unsolved bug. But Google itself is promoting the concept of 'progressive web apps' so one would safely assume that the end goal is to allow web apps to be as feature rich (and as performant) as native apps.

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