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Agreed. Aren't these apps just an extension of the web anyway? If it's sent over HTTP and is accessible to virtually anyone who had access to the "normal" web, then isn't that the web.

I know many people are excluded because they don't have iOS running on the machine they use for the web, but not everyone had the means to surf the HTML/Flash-based web on Opera's web browser a while ago. Were they not part of the web?

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This all depends how we define the Web. If we focus on transport protocols like HTTP, then you are correct; but the whole point of the article is that you don't need browser/HTML/CSS/ajax/whatever to consume the content.

All that is no news, and the whole concept was very hip back in the days when XML and Web services were all the rage, some ten years ago. In my opinion, it's not about who will take over -- we will simply have different forms of content transfer over the Internet, and will decide on a case-by-case basis which is better in each particular situation.

One big difference is that a lot of people are willing to pay $0.99 for and app while the same charge for a web page bookmark would not go over well.

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