Chapter    10

Hardware APIs

One of the debates that comes up frequently in conversations about mobile development is the idea of web apps vs. native apps. So far, we’ve been writing native apps exclusively; by native app, we mean an app written in Objective-C, compiled into a binary executable format, and installed on a device. The alternative, a web app, is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; installed onto a server; and accessed via a browser—instead of being compiled into executable binaries, the JavaScript is interpreted at runtime. There are some frameworks available that try to bridge the gap, essentially hiding the web site inside a native app that is no more than a web browser, but it’s usually easy to tell the difference between ...

Get Learn Cocoa Touch for iOS now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.