The Shape of Mobile Development To Come

I think there's far more low-hanging fruit in making native development easier than in making web/hybrid apps feel "right". I've seen two just good hybrid implementations (Quora and Pocket), and yet I still run into defects using both.

I think the "write-once-run-everywhere" benefit of web views is disingenuous; the phrase should really go "write-once-optimize-everywhere".

If any write-once-run-anywhere solution becomes to popular then the likes of MS or Apple will try their best to kill it. See: Embrace, extend , extinguish by MS on Java and to an extent the web itself and Apple's ban on language runtimes/interpreters on the app store.

If every device allows for the same functionality as other devices due to identical software then manufacturers will only be able to compete on price.

I think Xamarin are going to be a really interesting company to watch for this stuff. Right now they have MonoTouch and MonoDroid as entirely separate products, allowing you to make apps using C#. But you can already reference libraries across both, and just do the UI plumbing separately, and if they're smart they will work very hard on what the author is describing.

While these things were great, in the end what most of us wanted was actually HTML/CSS/JS and the freedom to create beautiful things that it gives us. I would argue that default looking iOS apps are already stale and we want more control (which CSS is great at giving). I am banking my business on the same thing happening long term in mobile.

I agree that webview apps can't compete with native in certain situations, but devices are becoming more powerful every day and web technologies have already proven themselves with a large developer audience.

Also, I think there is low-hanging fruit just in the mobile web space: making more websites work well on mobile devices.

I would argue that such a model would need to include the ability to easily manage per record image assets. (think about how often we have images in a table view cell)

To that end, I've created an iOS library to deal with downloading these tables and images in a reasonable way. If you're interested: https://github.com/Smartovation/STRemoteResources

So I think the design of mobile apps will be simplified going forward. I could see moving towards simpler UIs like Craigslist. This is a major win in a variety of ways: faster UIs implies better user-experience, less computationally intensive UIs implies less drain on limited resources, and simpler UIs implies less design and development time. I love the idea of never stressing out about rounded corners, little shadow and shine marks etc. They're nice to have initially but just get old as one uses the same device/OS/apps for months on end.

Showing a dialog:

    NSDictionary *dataDict = @{'title':'example', 'other':'other text'};
    QRootElement *root = [[QRootElement alloc] initWithJSONFile:@"file" andData:dataDict];
    QuickDialogController *myDialogController = [QuickDialogController controllerForRoot:root];
    [self presentModalViewController:navigation animated:YES];

    {
        "grouped": true,
        "title": "Example QuickDialog Form",
        "controllerName": "QuickDialogController",
        "sections": [
        {
            "elements": [
                {
                    "type": "QEntryElement",
                    "title": "Title",
                    "placeholder": "item title",
                    "bind": "textValue:title"  },
                {   "type": "QMultilineElement",
                    "title": "Other info",
                    "bind": "textValue:other" }
                ]
            }
        ]
    }

It's really awesome, and makes all kinds of dynamic views possible. I was skeptical at first (as I am about most cocoa libraries) but I'm pretty sold on it since I gave it a fair shot.

I agree with your hope that Rails could somehow be extended to cover this mobile use case, wish I had the chops to create a Devise+MobileAPI generator with a iOS native MongoDB-sychro engine. (Can Rails generators synthesize ObjectiveC source code?)

By the way, every time I think about doing something about this I keep an eye on the folks at Parse.com: seems like every week they're solving more and more of the backend part of this problem. And they're working on front-end libraries as well...

I would argue that it has less to do with the ease of the language and instead the market effects of iOS.

It is not about problem of programming language or tools, but Java already told us the "lowest common denominator" issue you have to face when implementing abstract over different platform. When people working on abstraction, it mean they will spend less time on real devices and fine details, and this is exactly what makes or breaks user experience.

Edit:fix link