Ask a Dev: Should I Go Native When Building an Image-heavy App?

In the latest video of our Ask a Dev series, iOS director Ron Lisle shares helpful tips for designing image-heavy apps and finding iCloud code samples.

For an app that features many images, Lisles says developers can choose to go "native" — that is, design the app for a particular operating system or device (e.g. iOS 7 on an iPhone 5S). On a native app, the images would be included in the app itself.

Since images take time to download on apps, Lisle recommends "lazy loading," or bringing the images into the background with Javascript, which downloads each image more quickly. He also suggests creating a "hybrid app," which builds a responsive web app using the open-source framework Phone Gap; this will allow images to be contained within the app instead of downloading them. Read more...