Advantages of Web Technology for Mobile Applications

It is time to detail those benefits from Web-based Mobile Applications.

It is positively our opinion that in a great many cases they outweigh the issues and combine to make this platform the best option for mobile applications. There are good reasons why so many developers now turn to the Web for their applications.

Portability and Ease of Development

For Web developers, the first most important reason is the ease of development. There is no need to learn a new language, and only limited, usually optional, need for new tools. The technologies that combine to make the Web platform are highly portable and are just as available on mobile devices as they are on the desktop. While there are always small extra annoyances compared to desktop Web development, the majority of code that runs on the desktop will run exactly the same — or very close to it — on a mobile device.

Deployment and Maintenance

Additionally, the ease of deployment is unequalled. Putting some files up on a Web server is within everyone's reach, and there is a vast set of options available for doing so. Contrary to the situation that exists in app stores, there is no need for anyone's approval, no registration of any kind, and (in most countries) no censorship of an application's content. So long as you can share your application's URL, anyone can access it as soon as it is released.

Web applications are generally easy to maintain. Bug fixes become immediately available to users without having to wait for upgrades to roll out and reach all users — a feature that is particularly important for security issues and critically crippling bugs once deployed. For applications that have both a front-end and a back-end, making a radical change in the back-end normally entails having to maintain multiple versions of the back-end while waiting for all users to have upgraded to the new version. With Web applications, such complicated roll-outs are generally not actually required.

Inherently Multi-Device 

Perhaps the major advantage to Web technology is that it is inherently better at targeting device variety. The Web was designed from day one to work on a great multiplicity of devices with varying operating systems, screen resolutions and sizes, font, color depths, input methods, etc. For the first Web browser that was easy: it did nothing more than rich text with links.

 But as the ability to render increasingly complex interfaces and interactions were added, tools to provide for their adaptation to highly varying device characteristics have been devised both at the W3C and by the Web development community (e.g., jQuery and Modenizr).

In fact this ability to work across fragmented device capabilities means that the same code (or at least code that is for large parts shared) can be used to target desktop and TV devices in addition to mobiles. A good example is Facebook on iOS and Android, which is actually a Web application running inside a native application wrapper.

There are limitations to this in that in many cases it is a good idea to have a very different UI when screen size changes by that much, but all of the logic and most of the graphical items ought to be shareable.