Still Fighting The Wrong Fight

At the moment web apps are not ready to replace native apps. I believe one day they will be but it might become a difficult journey.

(Caveat: I am not an iPhone dev) When the iPhone first came out Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of having web apps, yet people everywhere started clamouring for an SDK (rightly so). With a web app you may not be able to access all the juicy goodness of the on-board hardware (GPS, compass etc). Until those things become accessible via web-based software, I don't think we'll see a massive exodus.

If Apple has their wits about them, then they'll keep introducing new hardware features and the the inventive developers will find cool things to do with them, but only with native apps.

I do think we'll end up with making a shift to more mobile web apps one day but I'm no longer clear on what that journey will look like.

I only somewhat agree with the blog post you linked to.

The problem with webapps is it makes it extra easy for closed source vendors to just lock all your data way just to be dicks.

For example, look what happens when your Google account is locked... there goes all your mail, all your stuff in Reader, all your stuff in Docs, no more posting on Groups, etc etc etc. Now, imagine if Google was evil.

The only way for webapps to flourish on the web in the way mobile users would need, licenses like AGPL would have to become the norm, and downloading your data to use offline would also have to become the norm.

Plus, some things simply don't make sense as a webapp, such as applications that have large data sets (such as games). Until HTML5 offline storage starts actually working, theres no fix here.