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Comment by rsandhu | Hacker News Reader

Right, but the desktop web apps typically did not require any access to hardware devices such as the webcam. If they did, Flash solved that problem and we all know what direction that model is heading into.

Mobile apps are interesting because of the access to GPS, camera, accelerometer etc. Until all hardware is accessible through HTML5 providing an excellent UX, the app trend will continue in my view.

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Not to mention the performance penalty you'll pay by trying to process that data (camera images, video feeds, accelerometer data) in Javascript.

Some types of apps might work okay as a mobile web app (Facebook comes to mind), but there are definitely many native apps that simply aren't feasible to do in HTML5.

Can you imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app? Yeah, I didn't think so.

That is pretty much why I said "most". There are some legitimate native apps out there. You named one.

Of course I can imagine Word Lens being implemented as a web app. Perhaps not at this moment, but within 5 years? And what about technologies like NaCl? It is shortsighted to take such a view of applications that exist within a browser.

And in 5 years where will native apps be?

Yes, they'll be even faster; but the question is whether that performance will still be in demand in 5 years (over, time-to-market, say).

Native apps haven't been in demand on the desktop for a while, and smartphones are getting faster all the time. It seems that will be dual core, 1 GHz this year. How long before performance becomes a non-issue?

Quad core this year. Saw it on Mashable the other week.

http://mashable.com/2011/02/14/qualcomm-snapdragon-2011/#

Quad core is inevitable, it's just a question of when. They say 2012 for the chips in that article; but not when for devices using it. Dual core devices are scheduled early this year.

They also mention 2.5GHz - the big issue is power usage. I guess you you can turn off 3, and underclock when not needed.

In 5 years? Well that is an eternity in the mobile space and you are probably right, there is likely going to be a shift to a standard approach to app (web or native) development. What if a virtual machine such as the JVM existed for both Android and iOS was standard/consistent enough to write cross platform apps?

This topic is very popular amongst hackers lately. I find the web developers in particular resist the native app trend, to avoid Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android). Typical web developer lives in Javascript and a chosen high level language (Ruby, Python) on the server side.

Writes once, run everywhere has been promised forever and delivered never.

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