"One word: distribution. There are 2 billion web users versus 50 million iOS users."
- Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google
download a free copy of Angry Birds for Google Chrome
The article is well informed, and I would suggest the same in principle...
Except that in my recent informal performance comparison between JavaScript, C# and C++
the difference is still significant enough to justify native application:
* JavaScript - about 50 msec (Firefox and Chrome); IE9: about 190 msec
* C# - about 20 msec
* C++ - about 5 msec
This was a pure combinatorial calculation, no UI, no big data...
By the way, iPhone programming is Objective-C, as native-optimized as it can be...
Not easy on developers, but easy on mobile device...
Windows Phone 7 programming is in .NET (C#)
WebOS programming is in JavaScript
Here is part of one comment on original MIT article:
Apple has sold 187 million iOS devices (over 100 million iPhones, approximately 70 million iPod touches and around 20 million iPads),
...
By contrast, Google announced at I/O that only 100 million Android devices have shipped so far.
..
- Developer income (2010): $1.782 billion from iOS App Store vs $102 million from Android Marketplace
- 71% of all app downloads were to iOS devices in 2010 according to ABI Research
- Apple captured 82% of the revenue from all app stores in 2010 compared to 5% for Android
