I agree. What John's describing as the web is more like the Internet. The "web" is Tim Berners-Lee's "World Wide Web" (ie. hyperlinked documents rendered in a web browser).
> It’s possible that the word “web” is too tightly associated with HTML/CSS/JavaScript content rendered in web browsers — that if I want to make a semantic argument, I should be saying it’s the internet that matters, not the web. But I like calling it the web, even as it expands outside the confines of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The web has always been a nebulous concept, but at its center is the idea that everything can be linked. So when I open Tweetbot on my iPhone and tap a link that opens within the app as a web page, and from that web page tap a link that opens a video in the YouTube app — that to me feels very webby.
It's almost like he addressed the exact arguments you guys are bringing up in the article linked above...
He makes his definition of what the web is very clear, and cites his reasons behind them. You might disagree with them, but he does actually address them, to his credit. Perhaps you might make an argument why your definition of the web is superior to his.
The vast majority of native mobile apps are not. See http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/paid-apps for a good list of counter-examples.
The biggest problem I've found with mobile apps built with browser technology, personally, is that they often give none of the affordances of a native app and none of the affordances of the web. They become so obsessed with poorly aping native technologies* that they often fail to play to their strengths - things like deep-linking, tabbed browsing, lightweight usage, hypermedia, and so on. I don't really get it.
I suspect that the reason is due to the fact that people who are good enough to write a mobile web app that works well are simply not doing so, either because that's not what they do or because they prefer working in native technologies. Meteor+Bootstrap+Hammer+basic googling gets you head and shoulders above most people in the mobile webapp world, but that's not the status quo, despite those being some of the easiest-to-use frameworks I've ever worked with in the web space.
I suspect, but I really just don't know. shrugs
* Yes, some are as good as mobile apps, and it's not very difficult to be vastly better than the vast majority of mobile web apps, but good web app UXs remain rare birds for whatever reason
The "Doc McStuffins" game is hardly a counter-example in that it doesn't replace anything that would be considered part of the web. The argument wasn't that all mobile apps are "the web."