I was on a project last year, and we built a mobile website (could work in iPhone/Android and probably winphone, but we didn't test). Got a lot of immediate "yeah that's great" from some people. Partners reached out for potential customers/sales - every single one returned with "where do I get the app".
Us: "http://foobarsite.com.
Them: "Cool, but I can't see where to download the app!"
Us: "You don't - you just go to the website"
Them: "But I need an app!"
Aside from that, offline app cache is a PITA to implement.
Things have got better though. Web audio works on iOS 6, and Chrome on Android finally delivers a proper browser. I hope in a few years time we'll actually be able to serve games in WebGL to the browsers on both platforms.
Not true[0]. Home-screen web apps use the Nitro engine as of iOS 5. It's only embedded web views (i.e. the Facebook app, Google Chrome on iOS) that don't. FWIW Chrome is my favorite browser on iOS, despite the speed loss.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/06/ios-5-brings-nitro-spee...
We do actually download and stash most web resources, to speed up load times, so it's not completely window dressing. Our app is designed to be added to the Home Screen, but it also runs inside Safari or Chrome just fine.
One mobile app that I do think `does it right' is eBay's. It's not spectacular, but it's much better than their mobile site and feels like I'm using a real app. It really needs to improve upon its caching behaviour, though.
There's an advantage to Instapaper and company in that it's centralized and you only have to launch the one app to pull down all of your content regardless of the source.
And here I thought in 2013 apps could download their content in background when phone is idle. Maybe when the owner is sleeping at home with fast wifi all around. Might make too much sense though.
iOS does not allow background downloading, unless your app is part of Newsstand. While it would seem to make sense to make your news delivery app appear in Newsstand, it does come with some trade-offs, most significantly that your app is locked inside the Newsstand shelf and can't be placed in a primary app slot.
And, even if your app is in Newsstand, you have to actively go into Settings and turn on background download on an app-by-app basis.
Finally, even then, the app will only background-download if you're on a WiFi connection. I agree, this makes sense in this age of metered WAN bandwidth.
So, if you're using iOS, there's a really good chance that you will not have that content before getting on the subway, unless you remember to click into it on the walk over to the station.
In principle, you're exactly right -- but iOS in particular has been notoriously picky about app sandboxing, and there is a very short list of permissions that apps are allowed to ask for: location, push notification, and I believe now address book access.
(Okay, you could use Skype or whatever, but I'd expect the latency and reliability of the connection is too shitty for that.)
This could be changed without breaking existing apps.
Google could modify Android's app model just slightly, to enable apps to declare in their manifest that they support "a la carte" permissions and then enable users to select individual permissions. To work under this new permission model, apps would have to test for permissions, or handle security exceptions - small modifications.
I think this kind of change would be well worth it. For example, I prefer to trust the OS is preventing location tracking than that the app developer is being honest about turning it off in a setting.
This seems to be the case more often than not. Company executives feel pressured to release an app, any app, because "that's the future" according to whatever self-styled expert they listened to at XYZ Conference. So they crank out a useless app or two, and they get to tell their colleagues, peers, ad agencies, and Wall Street that they are forward thinking.
Such a strategy completely ignores the customer and his/her needs, of course. Publishing an app just to publish an app is pointless at best, and damaging to one's brand at worst. A company without a solid app strategy would be far better served just not releasing one at all. There is a negative ROI associated with a bad app, and not just in terms of the development and marketing dollars burned.
You may be a clueless pointy-haired boss if...