According to predictions of information technology research and advisory firms, such as Gartner, hybrid HTML5 applications
will be the future for mobile application development. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using HTML5
and related web application standards for the development of mobile e-health applications, using a diabetes monitoring
application as a practical use case. Context-awareness and visualizing multivariate data with parallel coordinates for
decision support are key features of this mobile e-health application. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of the
hybrid HTML5 approach with native mobile applications, and report on practical experiences with the development and
usage of the application. Our experiments show that developers of fairly advanced context-aware mobile applications
can definitely benefit from the HTML5 application portability across different mobile platforms. However, compared
to native applications, they should be aware of missing features such as secure storage, non-negligible performance
penalties of JavaScript business logic on a mobile platform, and an inferior user experience.