Ashley
[quote:2fet3nbx]If HTML5 will be perfect - literally native-grade - within say 2 years, why bother taking a detour now?
It's nice that Scirra is earning money on technology that might be reliable after next 2 years, but you should also ask yourself one question: Would you risk to sell C2 made game, i.e. exported to desktop or Crosswalk, knowing that you can't do anything IF your customers will have problems with your game? And that they will i.e. laugh at you and give 1-star reviews hearing excuses like "We can't fix this problem now, please wait a few months for Chromium team..."?
Imagine we made a native Android exporter, then your game crashes on a bunch of devices due to an obscure bug in the Qualcomm Android graphics driver. (This should not surprise anyone, it happens.) This is exactly the same situation: some third party is screwing up the game and there's not much either us or you as the game developer can do about it. In fact, it's worse, because even if Qualcomm are receptive to bug reports (which I doubt given my past experiences with other vendors), when was the last time you updated the graphics driver on your phone? It effectively never happens. So there is basically no hope of it being fixed, short of waiting for everyone to throw away their old phones and buy newer ones. Then people would probably be on the forum with posts exactly like yours, but just talking about Android compatibility instead of Crosswalk, and instead of "please wait a few months", it's "hopefully next year's devices will work".
Moving to native doesn't solve the problem of third parties screwing up the game. In comparison, having a company the size of Google handling device compatibility and pushing updates out every 6 weeks is pretty great compared to what happens with drivers, which is what a native engine would be directly interfacing with. Also drivers are not the only third party involved; a native engine would probably need a few third party libraries to cover some features which a browser has built-in (e.g. graphics, audio, networking...) and these libraries could have their own list of issues, and so on.
No platform is perfect, and I think it's easy to think the grass is greener on the other side. Remember we do have native tech experience with Construct Classic's runtime, and the C2 editor itself. Graphics driver bugs in the C2 editor have been a major ongoing pain with many extremely difficult problems and is still one of the top causes of crashes in C2, and that's on Windows which is more mature and less fragmented than Android.