Web apps have plenty of advantages over native ones, but also plenty of drawbacks

Jul 5, 2013 13:20 GMT  ·  By

While the desktop browser market is mostly stable, things are still evolving fast on the mobile front. The default browsers in the two major operating systems account for most of the usage, but there are plenty of competitors.

That's even truer in emerging markets, China in particular. There is a number of popular web browsers there, and all the big web players are building their own.

This is possible and particularly important in China because, even though Android dominates the smartphone market here, Google doesn't really have much to offer to users.

So a number of players have jumped in to fill the void. UC Web is one of them. With UC Browser, the Chinese company has a very popular product on its hands.

UC Web wants to use that power to turn its browser into a platform for apps. There are several Android app stores in China, all competing for users and none approved by Google.

The advantage of using web apps though is that they work in the browser no matter the platform used. Granted, the new apps are only for the Android version of the browser. With the release of UC Browser 9.2 for Android, the company is introducing a new set of tools for developers, dubbed UC+ Open Platform.

The platform enables developers to use standard web tools and languages to build apps that integrate with the phone. If this sounds familiar it's because Mozilla is doing the same thing, granted, at a lower level, with Firefox OS and Firefox for Android.

The Chinese browser maker envisions apps that run entirely in the browser but which work much like native apps and offer much of the same functionality. While the move is great for web developers, though not so great for the web itself, the browser, especially on mobile devices, still isn't able to match the speed or the capabilities of native apps.