14 DAY TRIAL // Google is a great proponent of web apps as alternative to native ones, be it desktop applications or mobile ones. Its point of view may be skewed by the fact that it does most of its revenue online and most of its major products are very much anchored in the cloud, but the company does a great enough job with its own products that the results backup all of its claims. Now Google is showing off the progress it made with the mobile version of Gmail using HTML 5 features to bring the experience on par with that of the native apps.
For mobile devices, native apps are a necessity as, until now, web apps could hardly match them in performance and features. This poses a problem for developers as mobile OSs are as diverse as the manufacturers that use them and even a focus on the most popular ones, iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm's Web OS to a lesser degree, still means a lot of development time and effort.
Web apps offer a great alternative as developers only have to build once, but this leaves them with the performance problem. Google, though, says things are on the right track and has pushed to make the mobile version of Gmail to be as close as possible to the regular one and to the native apps which Google offers for most platforms.
Google has been making good progress in terms of features, making great use of HTML 5 capabilities built into most of the modern mobile web browsers, but performance was still an issue.
"HTML5 and the mobile web are clearly up to the task of building rich and powerful apps. But speed is arguably the most important feature of any application. And we've remained unsatisfied with Gmail's performance on the mobile web. Until now,” Alex Nicolaou, engineering manager at Google writes.
“As of today, and thanks to numerous optimizations, I'm happy to report that Gmail for mobile loads 2-3x faster than it did in April (see Figure 1). In fact on newer iPhone and Android devices, the app now loads in under 3 seconds,” he added.
In just eight months, the Google team has managed to double or triple Gmail's performance to the point where it's now comparable with that of native apps. And it's not done yet, Google says it will continue to push the envelope when it comes to mobile web apps. Still, it's not ready to give up on native apps just yet and it says it will continue to create them where the alternative isn't satisfying.
