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Comment by tomerico | Hacker News Reader

The App Store / Marketplace is a very important distribution channel, which I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss.

Downloading an app in today's modern phone is almost as frictionless as entering a website.

Get the best of both worlds, build in html5 and put a thin wrapper around a webview with phonegap/titanium to get in the distribution channel

If you don't care about user experience, sure, do this.

Otherwise, build native apps.

If you can name one successful app that's just a webview then this might be an option.

The Bank of America app is a webview of their mobile site. It has excellent ratings, and is currently the #1 free app in the Finance category.

All that said, it's clearly not a native app. Transitions from screen to screen are slow, do not animate smoothly, and sometimes exhibit drawing problems.

The punchline: their app description announces an upcoming native app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bank-america-mobile-banking/i...

For the average developer, using the App Store as a distribution channel is like playing Russian Roulette with your resources. If you don't have considerable marketing money to ensure your app makes it to the top of the iTunes category, your app will simply be buried beneath the horrible user interface of the App Store. It's a little better as far as Android is concerned but not much.

An app store is great for consumers, it sucks for developers. Especially the iOS AppStore where people spend huge amounts of time and money for an app that has a good chance of being rejected for any number of arbitrary reasons. And vendors like Apple go to great lengths to make extra sure your app code is not portable to other platforms, so it's not like you can share significant amounts of code between, say, Android, Windows, and iOS apps.

Enter HTML (5) mobile apps, which work basically the same across all platforms. Sure, you have to make adjustments for different capabilities, but that will even out over the next few years. Basically HTML 5 finally fulfills the promise of Java after all these years. Of course, there are a lot of apps that simply cannot be built with HTML yet, especially games...

App store is a great distribution, not marketing mechanism. You still have to do your own marketing. It's just very easy for people to buy an app by tapping a button. And it's the default. Many people would be suspicious of apps trying to charge them in Safari.

Of course, if you have a non-mobile web app and are offering a mobile companion, web version it's fine, but if you're building a standalone iDevice app that you want to charge for, AppStore is the only viable option.

You're submitting that marketing an html5 app is any easier than an app store app? The app store is orders of magnitude smaller that the web. Talk about being buried.

    Of course, there are a lot of apps that simply 
    cannot be built with HTML yet, especially 
    games...

Depends on the game - many genres do not require a lot of processing power (e.g. puzzle games, many turn-based games).

Yes, but it implies the user anticipating the use case... Would you download an app which talks you through fixing a car engine before you actually needed it, for example?

Plus, it's most likely to get users engaged as your app sits there in their apps list

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