Prasad: There are a few things that are critically missing. VentureBeat: So what would it take for mobile web technologies to meet the needs of a company like LinkedIn and with apps as widely used as yours? … I’m not sure I could have predicted it, but we recognize now that HTML5 is not allowing us to do the best for our users. It worked really well when mobile only made up 8 to 10 percent of traffic. When we were a smaller group, we were hoping we could duplicate all that mobile web work to make our clients faster in terms of code deploys. We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email. Prasad: The way we built our system, we used template JSONs. VentureBeat: Does this mean that LinkedIn is giving up on developing mobile web apps or working with mobile web technologies? The second reason we’ve gone native is trying to get some of the animations - the spinners and the way they work - getting that smoothness, we felt like we needed native to really do that well. It’s not performance issues, like speed or rendering, but it’s still a big problem. The primary reason for that is, we’re seeing that more and more people are spending more time in the app, and the app is running out of memory. Prasad: We have definitely shifted from HTML5 to native. Did you just say these apps are native? Isn’t that the exact opposite of where you guys were philosophically the last time we talked about mobile? VentureBeat: Wait, let’s go back a second. Here’s the bulk of our chat with Prasad on engineering topics around the new apps: What he did say shows that HTML5 for the mobile web still has a bright future - but only if developers are willing to build the tools to support it. Prasad said performance issues weren’t causing crashes or making the app run slowly. In a revealing chat with Kiran Prasad (pictured), LinkedIn’s senior director for mobile engineering, we learned exactly why - and it’s not what you think. Now, all that’s gone, as is some of the optimism about the current capabilities of the mobile web. Less than a year ago, the company was touting its iPad app as fully mobile-web based, with just one screen, the homescreen, running natively.
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