Finally Heard … “Sanity” in Mobile Application Development

Finally, a refreshing, and sane way to look at the mobile app development in Dan Kim’s, “Myth debunking: WebViews suck, everything should be native” blog post.

Thank you Basecamp.

Agree wholeheartedly: You don’t need to be pure native or have 60fps on every screen – to make your customers happy.

This leads to an interesting thought: are junior devs being led astray by so much emphasis on performance? (thinking #perfmatters etc). What about “premature optimization is evil”?

“Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.” – Donald Knuth

I use Basecamp’s app, and I can vouch for it. It’s completely indistinguishable from native.

Let’s have freedom from the “native trap”. It has been sucking up our lives in endless tedium, slow release cycles, impossible demands. Pure native iOS (and even Android) is inaccessible, elitist, anti-web – even if it wins now.

Aside – the referenced TurboLinks library is an interesting approach to the React/AngularJS methodology. (Probably not what I’d choose, but a nice approach nonetheless.)