Mobile Development Considerations with HTML5 - September 6, 2011 at 4:51 pm

Lately, a lot of my conversations with our clients have been on what technology should be used for a mobile project. Leveraging HTML5 as a technology for creating mobile apps has been coming up a lot more frequently.

It shows how the industry is trying to move towards a common solution to resolve the cross platform issues across Mobile OS’s. For example, Adobe is adding HTML5 support across their entire app portfolio, Microsoft has committed to HTML5 across Office and Windows 8 and today’s  Salesforce’s announcement of their HTML5 strategy further re-affirms this transition. But is HTML5 by itself the silver bullet for enterprise Mobile apps?

At Model Metrics, we’ve done different HTML5 projects ranging from pure Web Apps (Order Entry integrated with Salesforce) to Native Apps leveraging HTML5 components (Digital Sales Aid leveraging HTML5 content bundles to show product information).  As part of these projects, here are some of the things that we’ve learned:

1. HTML5 allows us to create the same UI across the different Mobile OS’s relatively easily. Leveraging other JavaScript Engines out there, you can even make it look and feel very similar to a native app.
2. In order to create complex Enterprise Apps, you still need to develop a lot of business logic. This means it is not a quick or cheap solution. It will take time and it may be costly.
3. To use native components like bluetooth, camera, large offline storage, encryption, etc. you need a native shell to the HTML5 Application UI.
4. If you want to use a lot of file I/O type operations and track those activities, it is not as simple as it would be with a native app
5. In order to create 3D interactive elements, you need to have internal expertise with WebGL or leverage 3rd party Javascript engines. In some cases it maybe easier to do it natively.

So what does all of this mean? HTML5 certainly is going to be the future to help alleviate some of the cross platform application issues on the Mobile OS’s. Clients like it because they generally have HTML developers in house who can easily learn and use it to create mobile apps. Today, pure HTML5 mobile apps work great for simple apps which do not require much offline data.

In order to build complex enterprise level mobile apps; you still need a native shell (Native SDKs, Adobe AIR, RhoMobile, PhoneGap etc) that enable you to integrate deeply with the mobile device making them valuable for enterprises. Salesforce’s approach of using HTML5 and complementing the App UI with a Container strategy helps it meet that need.

As part of Model Metrics’s Mobile Strategy offering, we work with our clients to help them define their mobile use cases and what technology would best suite those use cases.