Why the mobile "write once, run everywhere" mentality is misguided

source: arktronic.com

Every so often I see articles and news blurbs about yet another product that allows people to create a mobile app once and automagically publish it on all of the major smartphone platforms. Recently, I've seen lots of buzz around PhoneGap becoming fully-featured in regards to Windows Phone. And just today I saw an article on Slashdot about Yahoo! getting into this space. Although, as a developer and a techy, I love the idea of being able to write an app and quickly have it available on multiple platforms, I must say I do not approve of actually doing it.

I have two simple reasons for my opinion, one minor and one major. They are, respectively, performance and user experience. Let's start with the minor one, performance. In order to write cross-platform code, virtually all of the current solutions require such code to be written in JavaScript. Simply put, that makes apps run slowly. JS engines are improving at an impressive rate, yes, but there is just too much overhead when using such tactics as opposed to running native (or as close to native as possible) code. In other words, less overhead yields faster code execution. However, most of the time, this point tends to be moot. Rich visuals, combined with ever-improving JavaScript execution speeds, tend to cancel out any user-detectible delay. Obviously, when apps have to do intensive processing on their own their performance will suffer, but most apps don't actually do that. They're either simple enough to not need to perform such tasks, or they offload processing to a much more powerful server somewhere in the cloud. And let's not forget Mono. While the Android and iOS versions certainly aren't cheap, they allow the exact same backend code to run on both of those platforms as well as Windows Phone.

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