Conversely, would you say that a kid in grade 5 who has bad scores is going to have a great job when he grows up, just you wait and see? We can only judge the mobile web as a platform (if one can even say that it is one platform and not many) by what it offers on mobile handsets today, not by what we hope it will one day become. Also, we can't judge it by hoping that one day, all the mobile browsers will conform to the WC3's standards, because we know how good a job today's desktop browsers do at quickly becoming standards-compliant.
The web is just another computing paradigm with its own strengths and weaknesses. It's not the be all and end all of mobile.
If mobile users only need service-type apps, the web can provide that. Programmers just have to write the screens.
The Web is a dumb terminal. You fill in a form, press XMIT or the equivalent, and get the next screen. Just because someone decided that the content needs to be jammed in a 900px table cell doesn't mean the web can't do mobile too.
The nature of the Web makes it well suited to building social apps on top of it. It would be hard to build social apps on an application layer that didn’t transcend physical platforms, because then there would be platform-induced delineations between the social groups that could congregate.
But the other motivating factor is that web apps by definition are a centralized container for the data you put into them. You use Freshbooks and you can access your invoices from anywhere. I think this will become far less important as cloud-storage-on-the-desktop services like iCloud mature and largely eliminate this advantage of web apps. Given this, don’t you think think we’ll actually start seeing a resurgence of non-social desktop apps that would previously have been built on the Web for centralized storage reasons?
In most cases, mobile apps are close enough to web apps in regards to barrier of consumption to make the difference moot, and when you add the native advantage, the result is a net positive consumer experience for mobile apps.
I don't understand why this has to be an either-or thing. I know it's easier for us to think in black and white terms but I don't see why web and native can't coexist for a long time.
How about services that already require you have an account? You have to log into a Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin client even if you install it as a native application.
If all you require to get through the day is an online paint clone, a calculator, a clock/weather app and a game where you throw birds at pigs, more power to you - I'm glad you've been able to shave a few seconds off your day.
Your argument assumes that building good web applications is merely a function of tools. It's not.
We have a performance-per-watt wall, plus a heat wall, plus a weight wall in mobile hardware.
There is a reason that Apple is pushing C-based development without as much as a garbage collector, it's not just the stubbornness of Jobs. It's because a dynamic language with state-of-the-art VMs struggles hard to do basic smooth animations on current-gen mobile hardware, and will continue to struggle, for at least the next five releases of Nitro.
You're going to need something like a battery revolution to build the mobile web app panacea that you want.
In the (pretty far I think, unfortunately) future, an SDK/Framework/Library à la jQuery will propose the same tool to run Web GL animations.
We need a UIKit/CoreAnimation for the web. The technology is not there yet, but it's going to be.
It's also like the arguments made against Java 10 years ago. :) I agree with you - it's not yet clear whether web technologies will significantly replace native for mobile or not. Even if they eventually end up doing so, that appears far enough out that I can't imagine making any decisions based on that right now.
I certainly haven't stopped making this argument for web vs. desktop apps, as it has yet to be solved. If it even can be solved (mainly the UI/UX issues; performance probably will eventually approach "good enough" for a given app.)
And it still holds true in many cases. Microsoft Outlook, in many ways an example of both great and horrible desktop software, still holds the email client majority: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/
Web apps are great when you get along with the designer's UI decisions. When you have a fast network connection (that's improved with specific web apps and offline modes, but it's by no means generally applied). When the servers are working well.
Mobile apps share the same advantages and disadvantages, but they're multiplied tremendously. I lose my mobile signal in most stores I go into, for example, and on an awful lot of secondary roads throughout the Northwest.
"The fine print
The email client a person is using can only be detected if images are displayed. This can give an inflated weighting to email clients that display images by default, such as Outlook 2000 and the iPhone. It will also provide a lesser weighting to those that block images by default such as Gmail and Outlook 2007. Those email clients that aren't capable of displaying images, such as older Blackberry models and other mobile devices cannot be included in this study."
Outlook isn't nearly the majority email client, it's just the one most likely to not block img bugs.
Do you have anything to support that claim?
That sounds like the arguments I used to hear from desktop devs back when web apps start to appear.
Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly. It's still in alpha stages.
When building mobile apps has matured and if they still have the performance and UI issues, then I might agree. But right now thats like saying a kid won't have a good job because of his grade 5 scores.