FT.com gets 25% of readers from mobile

Twenty-five percent  of traffic to FT.com now comes from mobile, while smartphones and tablets also account for an impressive 15 percent of new subscriptions to FT.com, reports Doug Drinkwater of TabTimes.com

Drinkwater writes, “In a recent interview with TabTimes, FT’s managing director Rob Grimshaw said that HTML5 is inching ever closer to winning the war against native apps.

“‘People are increasingly creating hybrid apps, for which most the code is written in HTML5 with a light native wrapper for app store packaging or to use some native functionality on the device,’ he said.

“‘From that perspective, HTML5 appears to have won. There’s a general agreement in the developer community that HTML5 is more flexible for porting features from device to device, or rolling out new features.’

“Not that the FT director is too busy celebrating to see any problems with the app. Grimshaw admits that FT initially struggled with refresh rates when the app’s browser was solely built by the Android team (the browser is reportedly now being worked on by both the Android and Chrome team), and reveals the firm is still a ‘couple of months’ away from introducing Flipboard-esque swipe article control to articles on the web app.”

Read more here.