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Comment by uuilly | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it but I would never use an iphone web app over a native one. It's less about looks than it is about feel / responsiveness. You also will always be stuck dealing with the forward button / back button structure.

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You aren't "stuck dealing with the forward button / back button structure". You can get rid of those with just:

    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

There seems to be quite a few issues with this:

http://nrbd.tumblr.com/post/55066018/apple-mobile-web-app-ca...

http://lists.apple.com/archives/safari-iphone-web-dev/2008/O...

These issues are from Oct 08. I don't know when they were fixed, but touch events and orientation detection work fine in Hahlo (an iPhone web app).

These have been fixed for quite a while now - the iPhone web app I put together supports rotation and touch events in application mode.

You are not stuck dealing with the forward/back button structure. iPhone web apps can be bookmarked like applications. The author can tell the iPhone that it wants to be launched in full-screen mode, without the nav bar at the bottom of the screen. (I believe this also works on Android)

Furthermore, web apps can be created that explicitly manage data and assets in a local store. Web apps can be quite responsive if they take advantage of this.

A native app will likely be more responsive, but a web app isn't as limited as you seem to think.

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