The Mobile Web vs. the Objective-C Web

Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design:

Frankly, as the adoption rate of iPhone increases and if iPad follows suit, it will become increasingly difficult to argue in favor of a starting point other than iPhone OS. The NPR iPad app, for one, provides a much more pleasant user experience than NPR.org.

The reason, I think, is that even if the people building iPhone apps would prefer, on general principle, to be building cross-platform open mobile web apps instead of banking on Apple’s closed proprietary platform, there’s no way to build cross-platform web apps that provide the same quality of user experience. The NPR iPad app is indeed terrific, and I don’t think it could be replicated as a mobile web app — at least not with the same amount of work, and not in a way that’s cross-platform.

★ Monday, 5 April 2010