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Comment by korch | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser.

Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps.

Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream.

If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't?

Apps should have been the web the entire time.

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Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments. This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.

That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that I'm unaware of (which is possible)?

new tech: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Native client, as the name implies, runs native code.

Low latency audio, hardware access, virtual memory, et al aren't handled at all or well by NaCl. So something on the scale of Photoshop with it's ability to edit 250MB+ images is nigh impossible with NaCl. Something on the scale of Logic Audio or Cubase, impossible.

Also, with a network bottleneck, mutli-GB 3D games will be unpleasant at best.

Maybe in a decade though.

Once you've overcome the current limitations of HTML by adding native code, offline mode, hardware support, local file access, and so on, is it really meaningful to call the result a "web" app? It's more like a native app written to a cross-platform layer (huh, somebody told me those were evil) that you can easily install from a web page.

The names "web" app and "native" are far too coarse grained to be meaningful. The important parts are the details.

Zero install or heavy weight install? Cross platform or single platform? Offline accessible or not? Safe for anyone to use, or not? Deep linkable or not? Etc.

These attributes can be mixed and matched. And will be.

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