The debate
It’s 2010 and debate rages in the mobile industry over the future of applications.
On one hand, people seem to love native client apps. A quick download process from an app store, and the shiny icon is sitting on the mobile device’s desktop, ready to go.
What’s more, as a developer, I might even get paid for it. But wait! Damn. If I want to reach lots of users, I have to write different code for every single device platform. iPhone, Android, Symbian. That’s a lot of code to keep in sync. And I need users to keep updating the applications every time I make a small change.
On the other hand, the mobile web. Build a site which looks and feels like a self-contained application but which can render nicely on a variety of platforms. (It helps that a lot of modern mobile operating systems have broadly similar browsers). I might not be able to make money by selling access to it, but I can update the site whenever I want, and users will see the latest and greatest version.
In reality, there’s an essential role to be played by both types of application – as there is for computing in general. But the debate still continues and it’s fun to be involved.
Enter WhitherApps
So what’s the point of this site, then?
WhitherApps is a bandwagon-busting experiment. I believe there are far too many native client apps which could have been far better written as mobile web apps. What we’re going to try and do is take a few examples, apply a little reverse-engineering, and rewrite them, warts and all, with web technologies.
We’ll focus on native client apps that are free to download. These wouldn’t have suffered commercially had they been written this way in the first place.
Obviously, we’ll also focus on feasible genres of apps. No 3D games or background apps, for example. To start with, informational media apps (such as newspapers and broadcasters) will be in the spotlight.
But otherwise, we may not need to pull too many punches. Offline access? Through the wonders of HTML5, that should be OK. Native device API access? Well, BONDI and proprietary libraries permitting, we’ll have a go – and there’s always PhoneGap too.
Each post on the site will be a walkthrough (or part of a walkhrough) of the process. As we get our hands dirty, from the protocol-sniffing to the pixel-jiggling, you can follow the steps we took.
Stay tuned and wish us luck!