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Comment by technoslut | Hacker News Reader

>Google hasn't "miserably" failed, they use the same basic strategy that LinkedIn does; namely, a they make hybrid mobile apps where they mix both native and HTML5 components to get the best performance and flexibility. It's worked quite well for them.

Maybe I'm mistaken but Google released an official Gmail app on iOS that was basically HTML. Everyone hated it. The same goes for the situation with GMaps. Virtually no one used the web app and now Google Maps is the top ranked free app.

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Everyone hated it.

There's a tech community confirmation bias at work here. I can't see what the ratings were like before the most recent version, but Gmail has a 3.5/5 rating on the App Store right now. I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users found it to be fine.

The ratings were particularly low before it went native. I know because I have a Gmail account in Mail.app and didn't use it because of this.

It's one thing not to listen to MG Siegler complain. It's another to excuse everyone else who complains on the App Store. They may not know the reason but they know the effect.

Ratings are far from a scientific way of deducing an app's value.

Strawman. They may not be scientific (statistics is a science, btw), but they are one way we have to infer whether people hate an app or not, which was the topic of this branch of the conversation.

I suspect that a lot of "ignorant" non-tech users didn't find it at all. You have to be fairly adventurous to even try a different mail client than the default Apple app.

I've never actually been able to get a confirmation one way or the other oh which of Google's native apps are "hybrid" apps and just how much of those apps is done in HTML5. The previous version of their gmail app seemed to employ a lot of HTML5 because you could see the main inbox list re-render occasionally. That app performed perfectly well for me. Unless we hear from Google officially about the new app we'll never know. It could be that it's full native, or it could be that they've perfected the HTML5 code to make it feel completely native. Who knows.

I assume the current Gmail is mostly written in native code because it is faster and there are elements in it that don't exist on the web site.

The original was just a wrapper for the web site which had unusually high negatives from users and reviewers alike. I never used it since I read the reviews before I actually downloaded it.

It's certainly not fully native. It has a number of issues that make it a poor experience in my opinion.

- Emulated scrolling feels wrong. This is my biggest issue.

- Slow launch and mailbox load time.

- Numerous short pauses while navigating.

It's a big improvement over the previous iteration, sure, but as a user I don't see why I should lower my standards just because Google (a company not short of engineering resources) chooses to advocate a particular technology.

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