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Comment by MattRogish | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest problem here is that iOS/Android WebViews are incredibly sensitive to memory and CPU, and if you just take an otherwise amazing desktop or backend developer and throw them in mobile webview, you're setting them up for failure.

The webview is a whole different ball of wax (my last gig was PhoneGap development on iOS and Android) and if you are not, from day one, incredibly focused on performance (CPU and Memory) you're gonna have a bad time.

Knowing what I know about making PhoneGap apps, there's nothing inherent in what FB is doing that the WebView is incapable of doing. It's just really hard to get it right, much harder than a native app.

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How much alike or different are the tweaks required for optimizing for webviews between platforms?

No harder than getting it right in native code on 3 different platforms.

Depends on what you mean by "hard". Although it's time consuming to learn different platforms, there are not a whole lot of gotchas you have to discover on your own. It's all been done before and well documented.

PhoneGap development is hard inasmuch as there are tons of gotchas you don't know about and haven't been clearly and extensively documented.

Hard as in writing code in three different languages. Apart from that I think tech community giving too much credit for Apple and especially Google. They could have fixed this native vs html5-js-css thing two versions ago.

Three different languages that provide vastly superior runtime libraries and tooling that facilitate implementing first-class applications on the target platform.

I agree that supporting multiple platforms is suboptimal, but instead choosing a suboptimal common platform isn't any better.

We already tried that once with Java desktop applications, and Java at least tried to provide a viable common widget/platform toolkit.

No, we tried it once with web applications, and it worked brilliantly.

When did that happen? Are we reading the same article?

Sorry. What I meant was, web applications have been a successful cross platform way of delivering software for the past 10 years. I don't see any reason why it can't continue on mobile, especially now that the hardware is catching up.

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