IOS 8 and Hybrid Mobile App to Go hand in Hand- Not Google

Built using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Hybrid apps run inside a wrapper of native code allowing installation from app stores and access to device-specific features. Google should be leading HTML5 development, but is astoundingly not working. Let’s read on to explore the depth and height of this notably changes here.

Apple though not a champion of open source or open standards, with iOS 8 it has become both. It has also introduced significant improvements for application developers who hope to exploit new API will need to work around a bug that breaks a common way for loading local files from the device.

Besides, here a few more benchmarks that sets IOS 8 a potential leader to be a huge win for hybrid apps.

HTML5 Support Level Test

The HTML5Test.com benchmark reveals that there are some APIs that are only available in WKWebView- a very supportive to iOS 8 version.

Webgl Is Now Enabled

WebGL was a hidden feature in iOS 7 but starting in iOS 8, it is officially supported in both WKWebView and UIWebView. This is huge for developers who require native-level 3D animation capability, especially for game app developers

Improvements to CSS3 Capabilities

iOS 8 has implemented many more CSS3 features than iOS 7

·         To control an element( images and videos) to fit in the parent container

·         More design support for text decoration party

·         Shaping floating content and keeping text-wrapped

Completely a Different Set of APIs

The most notable change is that WKWebView now has a mechanism to communicate between the native layer and the browser layer. For example, Cordova utilizes internal AJAX an IFRAME element to pass the data. WKWebView provides a direct way to send data between the layers. It will be much more accurate and take much less overhead compared to the UIWebView way of sending messages.

In a nutshell, all HTML5-based hybrid apps will run much quicker and become more stable for iOS devices with the new the new WKWebView engine. Playing a bigger and bigger role in application development...a lot of games and apps can be seen in future.