Right now, we're working with several clients who are asking: Should we do a native (iOS or Android) mobile app or a mobile web app in HTML5?

Naturally, you'll always have to consider the business objectives such as experience, speed, and hardware feature advantages of native, but often the final decision comes down to budget. Curiously, we've found that a large portion of iPhone apps could have just been done in HTML5 and reach would have doubled. (I suppose iOS developers made the decision to go with what they know.) There are of course frameworks such as Appcelerator that allows native development and deployment to iOS, Android, and Blackberry, but such frameworks have natural limitations and may not work for your needs or turn out to be too expensive still.

For those of you on the fence, we found this to be a good primer on HTML5 vs Native mobile development. It gives you a fair idea of what the cost vs benefits are and it's a good framework for thinking about your priorities when making this choice.

Happy weekend!

Creative agencies such as advertising and design firms must deliver high-quality sites and apps on aggressive schedules for big brand clients. Unfortunately, agency teams often have limited technical expertise and few engineering resources. Agencies are driven by creative. They have amazing creative, art, and design teams. However, they seldom have deep technology experience and they often lack depth in software development. Driven primarily by creative marketing people, agencies seldom have creative technologists on staff and they struggle with technical documentation, process, and software development discipline.

This is why Fabric are the preferred development partner for agencies when they need to deliver social sites and apps for major brands. We add layers of expertise, skills, and proven execution ability to agencies in need. We've done it for Carmichael Lynch, David & Goliath, and even for interactive agencies such as Rocket XL.

We help agencies with technical expertise, writing functional specifications and UX documentation. We offer integrated development teams and our battle-tested process to deliver large scale social sites, complex API integrations and data aggregation solutions. Custom CMS builds or complete transition or integration of CMS solutions such as Silverstripe, Wordpress, and OneSite.

But most of all, the main reasons agencies hire Fabric is to make sure that important projects are delivered with top quality, on-time, and on-budget. Agencies smile. Clients are happy. That's what you want, right?