The implication that "a web OS" is what people want raises some question marks. I use the web a lot on my phone--for reading documents. I use applications for interacting with services because, still (and this is years after FirefoxOS), the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful. There may be something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, but at the same time--if it's awful, it's awful, and so going towards real applications is the only thing that makes sense unless you want to make devices that are awful. Nobody wants to make devices that are awful.

Letting "the web optimize" your dialer, though, is perhaps the most dangerous idea I've heard in a while. Core applications under no circumstances should be optimized by the web because that's how you get malware masquerading as those core applications. No bueno.

> the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful

I think the implication is that if FirefoxOS had focused on making it not awful, they would have done really well.

It'd be awesome to have a phone for which app development is all done in HTML / CSS / JS while still remaining fast and efficient.

Lots of things would be awesome. You have to have something that is not awful to get people invested in pulling something off.

Palm - we are going to build a device that will let you build apps using web technologies. Developers rebel, Palm releases a native SDK.

Apple - you don't need native apps you can build great web apps. Developers and users rebel, a native SDK is introduced 9 months later.

Blackberry - you can build apps using Adobe based web technology. You get the picture...

None of those examples are what I described. Palm came closest, but still was web-like apps, not actual web apps.

That's just the point. Every mobile platform that come out has tried to tell the "you don't need native apps you can build web apps story" at some point besides Android.

Instead of web apps, Google stuck the world with a sub optimal Java implementation that they spent years trying to optimize.

None of those platforms told that story. None of those platforms released with web apps only.

Apple only allowed web apps at first. Palm's first SDK for WebOS was based on web technologies. BlackBerry's first SDK was based on Adobe Air.