From a global perspective, is it?

>By the end of this year, 6% of the global population will own a tablet, 20% will own PCs, and 22% will own smartphones.

http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-and-tablet-penetra...

Smartphones and tablets have browsers too, and they are by far the most used app on any platform.

Unless the phone already has a facebook and an amazon app, in which case the browser drops to 15th most used.

Interesting. Source?

Software is not a zero-sum game, so yes it's not just pessimistic. It's wrong.

Is it that time again?

if the web primarily became a data-layer for mostly native apps would that really be such a bad thing?

I'd say yes. We've been down that path before and i strongly believe that native apps are needed in a relatively low number of cases when you either need all the performance in your app or when you're dealing with some very tricky input. The rest should be absolutely fine with apps built with browser technologies and adapted to OS (with Apache Cordova or whatnot). Just as with WhatsApp - that app is pretty straightforward and it could be easily written in HTML5. It doesn't require heavy computation, it doesn't have any complex input methods, it doesn't need to deal with local storage etc.

Web allows us to create one app and with tiniest of modifications that app could be available on all of the major platforms. Don't you think this is by far better future than multitude of various platforms and versions of those platforms (see WP, Android) when you'll need a team of developers just to finish multiple versions of your app?

Yes, because overloading HTTP(S) as a data layer for native apps leaves a ton of performance and security on the table. It's for web browsers, not every possible use case for sending a buffer of bytes from A to B.

People use HTTP because it's what they know, not because it's technically a good (efficient, reliable, scalable) approach for their particular use case.

It does make sense for apps that also have a web component, but that's becoming less and less necessary. When you can drop it, the possibilities are pretty amazing having a fully-capable computer with CPU equivalent to a 2010 Macbook Air at your disposal at the edge of the network.

Hell, my latest project doesn't even use DNS.

This, a million times.

I had to fight more than once against management in order not to use HTTP for everything. HTTP isn't even that simple to deal with. Good thing is that the numbers were always with me, and with code examples, it was always doable, but it's incredible how HTTP got its way in people's minds!

Nope, computer end-points keep going back and forth between thick client and thin client. They both have advantages and disadvantages, depending on relative cost of hardware and how hard it is to maintain the code.