>Rick, I previously read your article and it aptly describes the pain we're feeling. Apple intentionally handicaps the iOS browser (and any other browser that runs on iOS) to force developers to create native apps. Why? Because giving html5 web apps anything more than basic capabilities breaks down the pay-wall garden that is the app store. Apple is giving a big middle finger to html5 app developers, meanwhile the mindless apple-herd keeps buying these damn devices. We've been painted into a corner and are now working on a native app to overcome the html5 limitations that Apple has intentionally and artificially created. Apple, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook are, needless to say, not on my Christmas card list.

Yup unfortunately that's true. Actually Safari in iOS 8 works pretty well (much improved), but the WebView control and especially pinned iOS apps still have this insane bookmark only feature where you click off and lost the actual state of the browser.

Cordova is an option for that.I've had pretty good luck with converting apps that way, but then you still have to go through the headache of getting things into an app store. Sure would be nicer if we could just run a full screen Web app from a desktop shortcut. It works pretty well on recent Android versions, and even Windows Phone (other than the nasty icon/splash screen crap they have)...

To be fair though - I don't think it's just Apple that's to blame. It's the W3C with their glacially standards progress and old fashioned approaches. Cordova has kind of provided a good blue print how we could drive a lot more innovation through plug-in models that can interface directly with hardware to open up the space and provide much better integration. The same model could be implied to browsers with just some minor additional security infrastructure.

Alas, it's barking up the wrong tree. Mobile remains to be painful any which way you do it - there are no easy solutions that I know of just options that may be less painful to some of us :-)

+++ Rick ---

>>I talked about the wide host of issues that Mobile Web on its own has (unfortunately):
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>>The broken Promise of the Mobile Web"
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>>I honestly wish that we could move into a world where 'mobile apps' aren't necessary and we could just use the Web - and I think it will happen evenutlaly - but we're still a long way off from that now.
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>>+++ Rick ---
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