HTML 5 vs. Native Applications

Published on July 12th, 2010 by Glenn Kelman

Updated on October 5th, 2020

Every month or so, as part of a series of talks called Engineer-2-Engineer (E2E), one of the gods of software engineering descends into the San Francisco offices of Redfin or Digg to give a technical talk on a practical subject. We’ve had architects from Twitter, Facebook and Pandora talk about Scala, mobile and Hadoop.

Now Redfin’s very own Sasha Aickin just published the slides for a discussion he led last month, about whether to use a web standard like HTML5 for building mobile apps in lieu of building separate proprietary apps for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and other devices.

Like everything Sasha writes, it’s funny and thoughtful. The basic argument is that you should use HTML5 unless you:

you need to use the mobile device’s camera, accelerometer or notifications,
you need the app to actually, you know, look and feel really cool
you need to make money from the app, especially by charging for it
you’re worried that no one will be able to find your app outside of an app store like iTunes

Up next are talks about Node.JS, Cassandra, Clusto and scaling an engineering organization. You’re all invited!

Glenn Kelman

Glenn is the CEO of Redfin. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management, and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree’s early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to the Redfin blog and Twitter.

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