Yesterday around 300 attendees came to the amazing L.S.O. at St Luke’s in London, England for Reasons to be Appy conference. In nine presentations several speakers covered all kind of concepts around app development, from typography to mobile debugging.

Mozilla’s presentation was Christian Heilmann talking about the controversy around the battle of native vs. web app development and explaining that we should not thrive to simulate but to invent instead. Not everything about native apps is as rosy as the headlines in the tech news outlets make us believe. There is quite a lack of basic HTML5 support in mobile browsers and for now hybrid apps and using libraries and polyfills seems to be the safest bet. The talk also covered a request to try out alternative mobile browsers like Firefox for Android, showed the boot to gecko project to free mobile hardware and make the mobile web affordable and asks developers to stop targeting specific browsers and block out others.

The slides are available and here is a screencast of them in sync with the talk.