MobiUS Mobile Web Browser for Apps Offers HTML5 Devs a Boost

The company appMobi has a new offer for developers, game lovers and the growing HTML5 community. The company today introduced MobiUS, a Web app browser designed to run apps written in HTML5 and to extend to them the full features of their smartphones — GPS, gravity sensing, the accelerometer, the camera, sound and vibration, the file system and more — that native apps enjoy.

MobiUS also includes appMobi's DirectCanvas, a game acceleration technology said to improve a game's performance by 500%. (This demonstration video shows the pep offered by DirectCanvas, bumping the frames per second in a game from approximately 7 to 47.)

"MobiUs [has] the power to disrupt everything you know about mobile apps," Sam Abadir, appMobi CTO, said in a statement. “Game developers always push technology to the absolute edge of its limitations, in order to make entertaining, thrilling and compelling games, and they are finding the combination of MobiUs and appMobi’s GameDev XDK give them performance up to and even beyond the speed and capabilities of Adobe Flash.”

The browser, available free in the Apple App Store (an Android version is coming), can run independently or from within a user's preferred mobile browser, such as Safari. Other features include:

An early criticism: DirectCanvas is only available to appMobi developers, which will likely limit its traction. "Somebody with realize the same performance gains in a slightly different way, open source their efforts and totally blow DirectCanvas's popularity out of the water," commented YouTube users jcrowcroft.

Still, responded sega7, "This can help the infant HTML5 community tremendously, enticing more people to develop fro HTML5 [and] ... cause people to look at HTML5 games seriously for once."

The appMobi platorm and MobiUS browser, say the company, allow HTML5 developers to create market mobile apps on the Web that, in performance and functionality, are indistinguishable from native apps.

MobiUs, added Abadir, "empowers Web apps and opens up the entire World Wide Web as the new app store.”