No. Somebody please stop this guy. After reading this I feel about him like the machines must have when they sent the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor. Web apps are to native mobile apps as Java apps are to native desktop apps: ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience. With some notable exceptions I think they can be a pragmatically motivated stopgap step (in regards…
> ploddingly slow with clunky non-standard UIs—a degraded, lackluster experience 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 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?