There’s a lot of misinformation being spread about mobile apps. Just last week, I read yet another article from yet another mobile app “expert” that made me cringe. The article falsely claimed that native apps are necessary if you want to use the phone’s hardware sensors, like the GPS.
Okay. Let me set the record straight: No, they’re not!
Native apps are not required to use the phone’s GPS, and that’s just the beginning. Mobile web apps can actually access almost every hardware sensor that a native app can access. If you’d like to learn which sensors a mobile web app can access, read this article.
So, how can you access the GPS using a mobile web app? It’s simple, and we have two short tutorials and a demo to prove it.
This tutorial explains how to use the HTML5 geolocation tag, which lets a web app access the GPS sensor.
This tutorial goes one step further, and builds a demo check-in app using geolocation and photo uploading. Make sure you check out the example on your smartphone.
Why is this so important?
Many companies believe they need to build native apps in order to access a smartphone’s hardware sensors. Not only is this thinking wrong, it can waste significant amounts of both time and money. You see, native apps are more difficult and expensive than mobile web apps, and usually don’t make sense from a business standpoint. To learn why, read this article entitled, “7 reasons why mobile web apps are better for business than native apps.”
Joe Stangarone is a 30+ year veteran of the IT industry and president of mrc—the software company behind the award winning development platform, 
1 comment
Alex says:
April 10, 2013 at 7:12 am (UTC -5)
The two explanations are very good but they dont answer why the html5 gps is far less accurate than using for example google maps or google maps which are native apps. I have been trying to get hold of high accuracy readings but outside the city the html5 map tells me that I am somewhere in a field and not the location I am actually at :/ so why is it that the further I get from cell towers in html5 the gps signal fades away?