 Welcome back, everybody. This is George Gilbert, San Jose Convention Center, the at scale conference sponsored by Facebook. And we're with Jonathan McKay. Jonathan works in the team, improving the web experience for apps. And Jonathan, tell us some of the most recent work that you guys have done. And then let's talk more broadly about how web experience is moving relative to app native app experience. Yeah, so two things that we've done recently that have been really impactful for Facebook. The one that we're gonna talk about today is push notifications in the Chrome browser. And so this is something that traditionally you only get if you build a native app, but now we've brought it to the web. And it's something that we have quite a few people using every day. Another example of a native feature that we've worked on is we actually worked with Opera to get contact importer as a feature that a website can use by working with the browser and then allowing new users to basically find friends easier even though we're on a website. So okay, backing up a sec. We had sort of before the smartphone revolution really took off, more and more of a richer experience was moving into the browser. And then we switched directions. Why are we moving to enhance the web experience and how is it coming up relative to the native mobile experience? Yeah, so it's interesting that you bring this up because it's been sort of this pendulum where we had the swing towards the mobile web and then it swung back towards native apps. And now I think we're still in the swing where native apps are the focus for most people. But actually sort of in this time the mobile web has been working in the background and catching up a lot. And so what we're seeing is that the mobile web has access to all of these features on smartphones that traditionally were just the purview of native apps. So getting access to OS level permissions like push notifications, like contact importer, maps is something that traditionally websites could use. And sort of all these things that initially you could only get by being a native app. Now web developers and browsers specifically are sort of bringing these and surfacing them to web developers so that they can take advantage of them. Okay, so let's talk about surfacing them. Is it Apple and its libraries and Google and the Android libraries surfacing these capabilities not just through the native APIs but something that the, I should say the application, I guess toolkits, but something that the browsers can get at? How is that process happening? Yeah, so the way it works is you have the base layer which is the operating system. And these permissions all exist within the operating system. Above that you have the browser. Now traditionally, you had to have your own native app like a browser to get these permissions. But what's happening is browsers like Google Chrome and Opera, they're pulling these permissions from the operating system and then building an API to surface it up to web developers. And so they're individually plucking out the permissions and the APIs at the OS level that they think are gonna be most important for web developers. And then building in that integration with the operating system and surfacing it to web developers in instances where they think it's gonna be used. Okay, so for corporate developers who are evaluating, do I do native apps or web experience? Where should they make that trade off? What's the sweet spot of one versus the other? Yeah, so a lot of this depends on sort of what you want your native app to do. And I think traditionally the idea was if you wanted to iterate fast and you wanted to build something simple, then it would make more sense to build a web-based app. And then if you wanted to have deep integrations, you wanted to use push notifications or you wanted to use like location APIs or contact importer, then you had no choice. You had to build a native app. So now what we're seeing is that this bifurcation is actually starting to blur a little bit. Like if you're a push-based app, now you can actually build a robust application on Chrome and still get access to push notifications. And it's just as useful as a native app. So it still depends, like you have to pick and choose and sort of determine what are the key features of a smartphone that you wanna be using. But there's more and more of these features that are becoming available via web that were not available before. Okay, so both are rising tides. Like are we gonna see convergence at some point in the future? Or is Apple fragmenting things with its WebKit sort of dragging its feet now and Chrome sort of on its own track? And what's going on with the capability, the richness of the browser itself? Yeah, so I think the web standards community has put a lot of effort into trying to bring these open APIs. So for example, Google Chrome, Mozilla, and Opera have all been working together on the push API. And there's other APIs that are on the way. And this is something that is being developed in an open way. And the hope is that everyone will sort of get on board with these as they gain momentum and get used by more and more developers. So for a corporate developer and corporate IT who's trying to evaluate, they still have a lot of web apps and they want to sort of move the experiences to mobile. How should they prioritize what they move in terms of the feature set of the existing apps? And are we going to reach a point where most of the development sort of the center of gravity swings back to sort of web experiences? I mean, I think on the Android ecosystem, it would be overly optimistic to say that the center of gravity has swung back to web ecosystems. But I think what's really cool is that the web, and especially the mobile web, is keeping up with native apps and is taking the best things that exist on native apps that might not have ever existed on the desktop and making them available. So if you're an IT person and you're thinking like, well, I have a bunch of people on desktop and I want to move over to mobile, what should I do? One thing that is an option now that wasn't available before is you can say, well, I want to develop something for Chrome on desktop and then it's just really easy to port those features over to Chrome on Android and all of a sudden you have a mobile experience by doing almost no additional effort. Okay, and how about moving that to iOS? So iOS is a little bit different. Right now the Chromium Engine, which is what runs Chrome and Opera, isn't available on iOS. So that means that with Apple's current implementation, it would have to be WebKit that implements these features and to date WebKit hasn't implemented them. Okay, so there they seem to want to keep the experience in native, in the native mobile apps. Is that, I mean, can we conclude anything else? Why, you know, why WebKit's not evolving to help with that? Well, I think right now it's still early days in a lot of these features. So Google has only had this rolled out for a few months now. And I think everyone's hoping that Apple will sort of see the value of this and then roll it out to WebKit as well. I think right now they're not saying that they don't want people to be using the mobile web. I think they're taking a more wait and see approach to see how successful this is for Google, to see how successful it is for web developers like us, and to see if it really gains traction. So they're in a wait and see mode and hopefully eventually they'll adopt it as well. All right, this is George Gilbert. Thanks for watching. We'll be back.