PLANET OF THE APPS? As HTML5-based digital narratives catch on, some publishers are reevaluating the need to develop apps.
I 116 n two years, downloading
and paying for the newest app from the Apple App Store will be soooo 2013.
The new HTML5 publishing platform seems to be changing everything.
But why are today’s native apps — those applications that are designed to run on a single platform - so quickly becoming yesterday’s news?
For magazine publishers, the future of
media on mobile devices is a fully realised web experience, not one of high-priced, unintegrated apps that outdate, and over- complicate, today’s ever-changing mobile technology, according to MIT Technology Review editor-in-chief and publisher Jason Pontin.
The difficulties with apps in publishing
is “profound… Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated,” wrote Pontin. “Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of an editorial product.”
Enter HTML5 — so called because it is
the fifth generation of HyperText Markup Language, the coding language used to create web pages. It bypasses many of the underlying components that native apps rely on, providing a faster, more fluid browsing experience, according to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.