We'll have to agree to disagree. URL discovery is still a major problem, it's what made Yahoo as a human-curated index popular back in the 90s. In my admittedly anecdotal experience with seniors, many of them still have difficulty understanding the browser since they are task-oriented, rather than URL-oriented. And apps are task-oriented. URL bookmarks saved to the home screen help but are still prone to problems e.g. website alters the landing page and now the browser returns a 404. No problem for us but a very jarring experience for seniors who don't know URI.

And Gruber's point is that web apps still require internet access to work, albeit with improvements like cached storage in HTML 5. Whereas apps on the mobile device already work and are already taking advantage of sensors onboard the device, but the internet (cloud) makes them even better. For example, Garageband for iOS would be really hard to do as a webapp. Not impossible, but hard.

"URL discovery is still a major problem"

come on, google search is smarter than the app store search

I made no mention comparing the quality of search results because that's a whole other topic.

I'm saying the App Store has categories, "Staff Picks", "iPad App of the Week" etc and it helps in discovery, just like Yahoo did back in the day.

Google would have to tread carefully here or they would step on advertisers' toes or invite anti-competitive scrutiny due to their dominance in search.

Google doesn't have to do this, web takes care of recommendations. We have HN, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.

All those things benefit both web apps and native apps.

Google Web Store might help.

"its no where close to the easy installation"

I'd beg to differ. It may not be identical, but App installation on my iPhone/iPad/Macintosh from the App Store is pretty much "Click, authorize, done"

On a web app, installation and updates are basically 'open the app'.

I'm not saying the iOS process isn't dead simple - it is - but its still a step behind web apps.

Lets just presume the web is simpler than app store installation, does that difference actually matter? I'd say it doesn't. As soon as you've reached a certain level of easy becoming easier doesn't give you as much gain. The advantages of native applications certainly outweigh the tiny extra work on installation.

App store installation does have one other advantage: a sense of ownership. The user feels they own the app rather than merely visiting it -- psychologically that is a powerful difference.

This can be fixed, but the fact that iOS and Android don't have a "automatically update in the background without telling me" is insane to me. I go weeks without going into the App Store on my iPad and when I do there are usually 4 or 5 updates waiting. They could easily update in the background -- why don't they if I've given them permission?

Automatic updates is one of the features of iOS5. So, its coming

With a webapp, the "installation" step is usually replaced with a "register" step. So in effect "install" becomes "enter desired username and password", "check for confirmation email", "click confirmation link", "log in".

That's a little 2005ish. Today we have a couple of ways to ease this:

1) With local storage registration isn't necessary in a lot of cases. It is only needed so the user can have the same data on multiple computers.

2) We have Facebook Connect, Google Login, Twitter Anywhere, etc today. It's a 2 step process, "Login", and "Authorize".