"Right now, the mobile wars have just two major combatants: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Nokia could yet make Windows Phone a serious third player, but there are also a few more minor actors with the potential to disrupt the market. Jolla is the most mysterious of those players, which also include Firefox OS and Open WebOS. Jolla (a Finnish word for a small sailing boat) arose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel's MeeGo project, canned in favour of Microsoft's mobile OS. The Linux-based OS has not been shown off yet, but Jolla has already scored a deal with China's top phone distributor, DPhone. The first Jolla device is due later this year, so to find out more I spoke with the company's chief executive, ex-Nokian Jussi Hurmola." Please let Jolla succeed. Pretty please with sugar on top. The industry needs this. Please.
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Member since:2012-08-23
Just an example: the Blackberry 10 browser has the best HTML5 score atm:
why would this "take away the control point from the platform" ?
http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html
For small players HTML5 is an opportunity, not a threat .
Edited 2012-09-26 06:24 UTC
Member since:2011-05-12
My guess would be that native (so non-HTML5) apps need to be approved by their app store operators. Thus HTML5 apps can be distributed and run on any device without anyone stopping you.
Then again I doubt they'll be as good as native ones.
The problem with something like "Jolla" that it won't have many apps, most people use iOS or Android based devices. So they need to have a system where a programmer doesn't spends his time on an app that runs on only 0.01% of the devices, but runs on 95% of them including Jolla ones.
Member since:2005-09-01
I really don't see why the whole classes of native apps couldn't be coded in html5. Lot's of them are simple wrappers for web services.
What HTML needs to replace them is standardized way to access native phone specific services like:
- Scheduled background jobs
- Notification
- Secure, phone sealed storage
- Keyboard dictionary access (and hooks to various input methods)
- Native authentication
- Payment
- Accessibility
It also needs a way to deliver 60 fps animated touch gui. Something like qtquick or XAML. As fat as I know I'd doesn't deliver here but given these are declarative solutions performance is not an issue here.
On the other hand there are areas where HTML is not suitable. But still its potentially a (superior ) solution for 90% of current style smartphone apps. And it doesn't mean having exactly the same code on all devices, JS devs are masters in handling system variances.
Member since:2006-07-14
What the sentence means is that the mobile OS companies will not be able to act as gatekeepers. Apple works very hard to screen applications to the app store and has used that control to censor applications it doesn't approve of for their content. If HTML5 as an app format takes off, they lose that control. They lose the cachet of listing the number of ios apps in the appstore. They lose the ability to brag about the number of ios developers.
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Member since:
2011-05-12
Apps written in HTML5 would run on any phone. Now each phone needs apps specifically written for them.