[evanlong]

"We worked hard to make our mobile apps fast. Try them out and let us know how we did: we have an iPhone app, Android app and an HTML5 mobile version."

Yay they made loading fast apparently. But any user of the app will notice that the linked in app feels slow and clunky. Great shit loaded. But it still feels slow. For example, take an iPad and go to Flipboard. Rotate the device. Notice how fast and smooth it is. Now go to the news feed in the iOS LinkedIn app and Rotate. It's slow. It feels like a web browser. It feels like they spent so much time optimizing the loading of resources and spent ZERO time actually making the client feel nice and native.

[viggio24]

Compared with the web based apps we had in the past the LinkedIn one is a great step forward. The main point according to me is not the fact that web vieww apps are slow, for sure things will improve in the future and web view perofrmances will increase in the time thus reducing the performance impact in most apps. The main point that should be discussed is why these guys insist in using html and js. People seem to forfet where html is coming from: it was a way to layout a page on screen. The reason why html acquired "desktop application like" capabilities was to provide some desktop features to internet based apps: at the end the clear winner was html5+js+css, while java applet failed and flash is its decline. Looking at the efforts done by LinkedIn engineers, you may appreciate the hard work they did and the interesting way they faced several challenges, but what surprises me is why those guys didn't follow the Obj-C approach that would have given to them the possibility to reach better results in a more natural way. According to me html should be used only in those cases where it is superior to Obj-C: publishing. It offers much more capabilities than PDF at lower cost. All other usages are wrong. Someone may anseer that LinkedIn preferred to follow the html based approach to leverage their investment i. The web site, but I will object that: 1. Html5 is the only choice for the web in the computers, which are not mobile devices, but it's a poor choice for all mobile devices that have a native development environment 2. The effor they did in fixing all webview issues could have been moved to do a better API for native apps. And yes, if you compare their app to Flipboard you notice the difference.