HTML5 or Native?

This is a subject which comes up quite alot. Everyone is talking about HTML5 but there was the recent high profile incident where facebook's mobile app was deemed to be too slow using HTML5 which is why they went and re-coded it as a native application.

Now it would appear on the surface that there was perhaps a basic issue of using a HTML5 app wrapped as a native app gives poor performance. However, if you dig a little deeper it transpires it wasn't just a HTML5 performance issue, it was how the app was implemented.

To this end, Sencha, they of the excellent Sencha ExtJS and Sencha Touch frameworks took it upon themselves to do their own facebook HTML5 app and call it fastbook to prove it was an implementation, not technology issue. You can find out more here.

In fact mobile browsers are good enough to even support HTML5 games with a decent frame rate.

Of course the great benefit of HTML5 is that it is truly cross platform. You can target iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile from a single code base. Then use something like phonegap you can package up your app for easier distribution and use phonegap to access hardware/device specific features.

Click for more on app development.