After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed regret over focus on HTML5, Kendo UI conducted a survey last month. Surprisingly, the survey contradicts Zuckerberg’s findings. After surveying 4,043 app developers, Kendo (a division of Telerik, a global end-to-end solutions and tools provider for professional developers) believes a major chunk of these developers are using HTML5 to develop apps while about 31 percent have plans to do so in the future. Although that’s a sizeable number, what’s surprising is that only 6 percent of the developers surveyed had reservations against HTML5.
It goes on to say that media reports of Facebook switching to native apps did not affect 73 percent of the developers and only a 13 percent reported loss in confidence, conversely 14 percent reported a boost in confidence.
When asked about its importance for their career, a whopping 51 percent of the developers say that it is immediately relevant while 31 percent believe it to become important for them in the next 12 months. Importantly, this particular finding in the study bashes Gartner’s predictions of 5 to 10 years that it made in July regarding the importance of HTML5.
The main reason behind the acceptance of HTML5, according to the study appears to be familiarity of languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript which 72 percent of developers approve, while 62 percent cite cross platform support as the main reason. However, what gets surprising is the fact that 34 percent list performance as one of its “benefits”. ASP.NET MVC turned out to be the most used platform for web development usage followed by 42 percent who use ASP.NET WebForms.
The report further quotes Jefferey Hammond from Forrester Research as saying, “Mobile app developers we’ve worked with report porting costs of 50% to 70% of the cost of the original native app for every new mobile operating system an app needs to run on.” This is quite an important consideration regarding the economic benefits of using HTML5 for applications which do not need to be deliberately processing intensive.
Among the concerns cited were the vast majority of browsers that need to be supported for desktop, tablets and smartphones, resulting in71 percent of its participants to be increasingly concerned about browser fragmentation.
The findings resonate the fact that no doubt what the industry says, developers are getting disillusioned with the huge number of platforms they are expected to support and the large amount of investment in time and money it takes. For now, HTML5 seems to be the only way out for this, albeit a little controversial one at the most. The survey gives us some very surprising and interesting insights regarding HTML5, though it has been questioned by some people as an “advertising stunt” by a company that develops solely HTML5 apps.
