LinkedIn has had mobile apps for smartphones since 2008, but they have been slow in coming to tablets. That changed this week with the release of their iPad app, optimized for the retina display. The app delivers almost everything you could want from your LinkedIn account, and does so quite quickly.
The surprise here, at least for people who pay attention to the geeky bits, is that LinkedIn has achieved that speed using a hybrid app structure that relies almost exclusively (95%, by the company's estimate) on the mobile web through HTML5 and a server-side javascript framework called Node.js. For years, the basic assumption has been that native apps are just faster than web apps, so if you need high-performance, you need to pony up for iOS or Android native development.
Among web developers there have been almost "religious" disagreements about native vs. web, and even among web apps between dedicated mobile sites (usually with limited content) and some kind of responsive scheme that serves the same content to desktop and mobile users. Josh Clark has a thorough discussion on his blog of the very contentious debate around the latter. The answer that many reasonably minded people have come up with, including Clark, is "it depends." And indeed that is the kind of thinking that has enabled the new LinkedIn app.
To start with, the designers removed extraneous design elements that need to be rendered by the browser, but that's in keeping with LinkedIn's look and just common sense. The real secret here is that the developers understood the nature of the data requests for the app. "The performance of a mobile app is often determined less by the performance of the code executing on the device than by the latency of connections back to a server—particularly when the app must make multiple requests of the server," Kiran Prasad, director of engineering for mobile at LinkedIn, tells David F. Carr of BrainyardNews in a story about last year's updated iPhone app.
All of LinkedIn's initial mobile development was done in Ruby on Rails, but there were performance issues, even when serving up a limited portion of the full desktop content. When the company started to work on its new iPhone app last year, Prasad moved to a hybrid scheme that leaned heavily on HTML5 and Node.js.
What's unique about Node is that "it's possible to achieve better performance by keeping the same connection open across multiple [data] requests," according to Prasad "Node.js uses an event-driven programming model that allows it to handle many open connections without running out of resources. As a result, LinkedIn is able to deliver much faster performance on many fewer servers, saving money and making users happier at the same time." If the app needed to perform a lot of processor-intensive data analytics, Node would not be the right choice. Bur Prasad says, "it is a great solution for most front-end engineering tasks—programs that essentially do heavy string manipulation to generate HTML to be sent to the browser, often personalized with input from multiple back-end systems." In other words, server side javascript is a good fit for the kinds of pages that social networks and other sites that customize content for individual users from multiple sources want to deliver.
LinkedIn's mobile smartphone apps have been increasing their reliance on the mobile web, "We had a 60/40 split where about 60 percent of any app was in HTML5,” Prasad tells VentureWeek in a story about the new iPad app. The big leap with the iPad app (which the phone apps will follow) was relying on HTML5 for all but a single screen (I assume the home screen that wraps around the app.), or roughly 95% of the content.
Prasad has also come down strongly on the side of dedicated mobile sites, or discreet app in native wrappers, as opposed to any sort of "one web" responsive solution for LinkedIn. "Responsive design might work for uncomplicated, one-off websites," he says, "but for applications or networks (such as LinkedIn is), responsive design is actually bad.… We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users]. A lot of responsive design is building one site that works everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”
In terms of the Tablet use case, their iPad app delivers on expectations. The news items which I never found compelling on the desktop site are rendered here is a Flipboard-like magazine array called "All Updates," that is very enjoyable to flip through. The fast part really helps here. And because this is LinkedIn, the who of the attribution for each new item is prominent and makes you want to think not only about what is being shared, but who shared it.
The only serious omission is in the "You" section where you can see your own public profile and keep track of who's viewed your profile, people you might know, your own recent activity and your own list of connections. There is no edit function here, however. So if you see that someone is looking at your profile and you realize you need to update something, you're out of luck until you hit your desktop. Maybe I'm missing something, but the risk of messing something up through fat-fingering on the touch screen would seem to be out weighed by the immediacy of being able to to everything all in one place. It also reinforces my feeling (that I realize not all agree with) that the tablet is being presented more as a means of consumption than of creation.
Similarly, you can "share an update," but you can't access your camera or paste pictures from your photo library from within the app, which is the kind of thing that users like to do on their phone or tablet. I'm sure its design is driven by their user data, so maybe on the iPad the functionality provided matches up with the "use case," but to me, it still feels like three-quarters of a great app.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think of the new LinkedIn app in the comments below.
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