I don't think cpu were ready back then. Sure you had that blackberry thing using the equivalent of the modern embedded webview but you couldn't do much heavy lifting with it.

Also many standard didn't exist. Maybe today, with webgl and asm.js and web workers It's viable, but in the days native access was the only way to provide a smooth experience. See: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest...

Good points, but I think that Facebook's problems might have been more about integration than about performance.

Found the technical writeup http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-coremob/2012Sep/0...

Two main issues back then were scrolling perrformance and memory constraints.

We're working at image heavy microsites at lookcast and I can confirm memory issues and composition performances are still constraining what we can do on devices.

That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices. And there were no sufficient, complete and useful HTML5 standards that could allows web apps to compete with local software.

Extending the web standards would simply have been too much work and caused too much trouble.

> That would have made the performance far worse in particular on low end devices.

Well, the most important thing people do, even on low-end devices, is browse the web.

Arguably not. But even with this use case, the Web has got significantly more complex. Local Storage, local databases, GPS access, gesture detection to name a few. That all hits Web performance hard especially on earlier mobile devices.

No, that would be IM/chat these days

Ok. But does that require more performance than webbrowsing?

See: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest...

A company worked on Android for several years, then Google bought it.

Google has ChromeOS, with a HTML based shell. And there were some news articles that Google is merging ChromeOS and Android - we will see if those speculations were true.

In addition to this. J2ME and Symbian (the two biggest mobile platforms when Android was being developed) were both based off Java so it made sense to use it.

That was tried, with the first gen iPhone, and again with the Palm Pre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

It was awful. I owned a first gen palm pre, and it was dog slow.

Exactly, the very first iPhone didn't even have installable third party apps. 'Why didn't they sue webaps' ignores the fact that it was tried right from the word go and in a fight with native apps that was skewed in web apps favour, they still lost massively.

Chrome OS is of course an attempt to build an OS entirely on HTML and Javascript, but you don't see it on phones because the memory, CPU and power requirements are too high. Eventually these problems will likely be solved, FirefoxOS was another attempt, but if we can't even do it right now there's no way it was a viable option back in 2005.