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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

HTML5, but I can't try it in my browser? Or play on my Android?

Try it the browser could possibly make sense. Or not. They would probably prefer people to pay to download and try the app (or download a free version and have it on their phone, as a reminder the can buy the full one), rather than try it on a browser and forget about it.

An Android release is also questionable. Not such a big market money wise, and they would have to port the rest of the environment too (the native hooks), AND take into account the various screen sizes and OS versions (50% of Android users still use 2 year old versions). Might as well don't bother at all.

Same here I would love to be able to try it on my browser before downloading the app. It looks nice

Occurs to me that they probably didn't want to from a UX perspective. The whole app had been made for touch, not point and click/drag. Perhaps the team felt the interaction needed to be touch-only. But a demo video may have eased this confusion.

Also, wouldn't the JS performance be worse in an App Store app as compared to the browser?

Depends: maybe they used something like Ejecta (https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta) which doesn't use the standard webview but re-implements canvas on top of opengl.

We did not use Ejecta, but the standard ios webview. You can read this article for more details on how we built it :

http://www.scrambledapp.com/articles/for-developers/

So? If the app's JS performance is fast enough to play the game, then there's no problem if it would be better on a desktop browser.

(Or do you mean the iOS browser? Still, doesn't matter. If you want to sell an iOS, there's just no comparison between the monetization facility of the App Store compared to the browser).

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