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Iphone app vs offline web app. What's the smartest way?

I am thinking of starting from scratch building a small application that fills in two technical requirements:

  • must be used on iPhone
  • should work offline

There are two obvious alternatives here:

  • Real iPhone app with offline capabilities
  • Web application using HTML5 offline, Google Gears or similar

With no experience in iPhone app development (I don't have an iPhone), I'm wondering which path would be easiest?

What are the learning curves for building offline HTML and building an iPhone app?

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It honestly depends on what your application will do.

MobileSafari supports all HTML5 offline content, so you can store data in a client SQL database, cache client applications, and more. The Mobile Gmail app is probably the most notable example of this, giving you full-featured access to your Gmail even if it's disabled. You can also use geolocation through the JavaScript APIs added in version 3.0. Web clips allow your web app to share the home screen with native apps. Learn more about using web apps on iPhone in this article .

Obviously building a web application will be of interest to people who enjoy working with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and possibly any language that runs on the server side). It is possible to do some really neat things with standalone web apps, but its performance won't be as good as native apps, especially on pre-3GS devices.



To develop a native app, you'll need to learn Objective-C (or C #, once Mono Touch is available to the masses) and pay a $ 99 fee that will be allowed for device testing and App Store deployment. More detailed information about the system is presented to you through various APIs such as camera, compass, multitouch, etc.

Objective-C is fairly easy to pick up if you are familiar with Java; you just have to get used to the square bracket syntax and memory management and then it's pretty straight forward.

Then there are hybrid systems like PhoneGap that provide more device APIs if the web app runs in a dedicated containerized app. It's also cross-platform, so you can deploy the app to Android and BlackBerry as well, if you like. It still requires you to pay an App Store fee, but if you're more familiar with web development, it gives you the best of both worlds.

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I can't tell you too much about HTML apps in general, but I can tell you that the API for is UIWebView

extremely minimal, and of course you can do much less than in a native iPhone app.



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A standalone HTML5 application will have security issues as you have to hard-code the secret passcode into code that anyone can see (by clicking the View Source or Check in Firebug button). You could just use http auth, but then you get ugly credit "from the API" with every tweet sent from your app, as well as that ugly HTTP popup from the browser.

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