Financial Times launches HTML5 web app

Agree. Have been using this today and am disappointed. When away from a connection, I can't launch the web app and access content; I receive a message saying I need an internet connection (Close or Retry), even after letting the blue bar run indicating that content has downloaded. It works offline if I leave the web app on without exiting, but this is unacceptable. How do I come back and read the paper if I need to switch to another app?

This is a bad idea - I've been using the new "app" all day and it is not good - it feels exactly the way you'd expect a webpage, albeit HTML5, to feel versus a stand-alone app.

I can't believe that the FT is doing this - I only hope that they will keep supporting their stand-alone iPad app.

It's not " technically, a web app", it is a web app plain and simple.

This is a horrendous move. The experience is inferior, and as a paying customer, I won't accept it. Responsiveness is terrible on iPad 1 and there is no offline mode, which makes this app utterly useless to me as I read the edition on my weekly commute.

How could HTML provide off line reading when not on the Internet? As a current subscriber, off line reading is important.

If they think the responsiveness is poor in testing, wait until they try using it in the real world, when they lose internet connectivity altogether.

Web apps saved to the springboard are great, as long as you understand what's going on. At my company, we have a few web apps for iPhone and Android which are tools for employees, who are trained to understand that they have to follow this install process, and that it can be sluggish at times, and that it will fail to function completely where there is no Internet connectivity.

You can't expect the same level of savvy and tolerance from a group of normal, untrained users, and you can't hope to train them. If your experience doesn't "just work" out of the box, it will find a hard time fitting in on an iOS device.

And let me get this straight: They're thumbing their nose at hundreds of millions of potential subscribers, in order to preserve their 500K readership. Yeah, makes sense to me.