A work around instead of native apps

Releasing an app per store can get complicated and take a lot of time. If you release it to your website it can be a lot simpler.

What if you could release an app that pulled the game right from your website. That way your fans could download one app and you can update your content to the web which is a lot easier.

Basically, it would be like a mobile website. You could update the website on your own and you can upload the games without having to go through the certification process. The question is if this can be done with a native app from Xcode or done with the Android SDK.

It would be nice to do this without having to pull up safari on the iPhone but instead have it completely done through your custom app. I would also assume that you would have to package a whole bunch of HTML 5 libraries in order to make it work.

Thoughts?

What you're talking about is web-apps, they already exist <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

Every now and then you'll hear stories about how web-apps are the future because they circumvent Apple's developer agreements and percentage cut, don't require a wrapper etc. Sadly this just isn't the case, it's awkward to handle payments for web apps, and apps sold in store get exposure, it's very hard to get that with a web-app, in fact I haven't met a single person in my life who has ever used a web-app!

Currently I use web-apps for prototyping, you can save the web-page to your home screen, so it even looks like an app!

I pretty much figured they are web apps. But as of now don't you have to use safari if you want to do this? Is there a way to get the same functionality in a native app? As far as I know the only way to do this is to go to the site and then bookmark it to your screen. It would be great to not have to go through safari.

Well, in theory, you could make a native app that can run web apps.

Nice idea actually, doubtful Apple would allow such a thing tho.....

Also there's the problem that web apps don't perform as well as webpages viewed in Safari or pages in a wrapper like cocoonjs.

Well, in theory, you could make a native app that can run web apps.

Nice idea actually, doubtful Apple would allow such a thing tho.....

That's what I'm thinking as well.

Although Google maps made their own version of maps but that isn't the same thing.

You can use UIWebView in Xcode but I somehow feel that won't be enough to run a game. Im wondering if there are libraries you could add from safari to make it work better.