With BB10, RIM Tries To Break Out of the 'Mobile Ecosystem' Model

Alt-kun writes "This past week has seen a couple of interesting articles about Research In Motion's strategic plans for BlackBerry 10. The Globe and Mail thinks that by pushing HTML5 for app development, they want to make mobile applications platform-neutral, which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem. And the Guelph Mercury notes that they also plan to push BB10 as the basis for a whole range of mobile and embedded devices, not just phones and tablets. One example shown off at the recent developer conference was a Porsche with a BlackBerry entertainment system."

Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[WhiteArmor]

Native apps will always work better and be less resource intensive than HTML5 based apps. You will never be able to match native code or get even close. Even Google understands this on mobiles, even though they still use the crappy Java. This is especially important on mobile phones not only for limited CPU and memory and the lack of good GPU, but because battery life is really important and already not that great.

RIM just wants to do this because they don't have the vibrant app economy than Apple and even Microsoft has. They want others to do the work for them.

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[Barbara, not Barbie]

One of the advantages of web apps in any scenario is the ease of cross platform compatibility

Sure, because HTML always renders the same on every browser and platform, always has, always will.

Except that it never had, and never will. Even Flash had better cross-platform compatibility (and better performance).

Re:Good for developers

[paulpach]

Besides, most popular apps on mobile devices are fetching information from websites anyway

The top grossing apps are without question games [google.com]

I have been working on making a game for mobile myself [blockstory.net] (yes, shameless plug) and I can tell you first hand that making anything beyond tic tac toe on html5 for mobile is crazy talk.