>>>Nobody wants a phone app to replace a desktop app either. A phone app is a subset of a full application, where some of hte features are easily accessible on the phone while you're out and about. That's usually report and lookup based data with some basic data entry and updates usually. You can do more but it's obviously tedious.
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>True, but out there I see phone apps replacing not just desktop apps, but desktop browser apps. I'm thinking of Expedia, eBay, Priceline, Amazon, Hotels.com, your bank, your favourite airline, etc etc. Some of them even have functionality not available on the desktop web version- e.g. check deposit by photographing both sides of an endorsed check and it's done, auto check-in and screen boarding pass for United Airlines, better currency management for Expedia compared to the web version. Looking closely I see that many of these actually are hybrid apps rather than complete native systems, but IMHO that's a natural and normal way to express a native app in 2015.

All things that you can do with a Web app.

I agree that the current environment favors 'apps', but a lot of it is not because of the lack of support on the Web. It's an eco-system issue because at the moment people look for top level consumer applications in an app store.

However, the story is different when you go to a lower level. Amazon, Citibank and United can certainly afford to spend the money to build 3 different kinds of native applications, plus a Web app. But most smaller companies don't have either the know-how or staff to support that.

Even if there were tooling that allowed you to write an app just once and port it to different stores, there are still deployment issues, dealing with the different store business issues, certificate management etc. that are freaking pain with apps. Plus OS upgrades that can screw existing apps and require updates. It's a nightmare to manage if you are supporting multiple device platforms.

Again I think this will shake out and the Web will win eventually - I'm just not sure when, mainly because some of the vendors - Apple mainly - are purposefully sabotaging the platform by implementing buggy and incomplete support for HTML 5 features and limiting functionality (like pinned Web links not retaining state between activations and generally providing an inferior shell UI for anything Web). Both Android and Windows Phone are doing a much better job of treating Web apps like first class citizens.

There are still issues though - the specs are slow to evolve and slower to be implemented, but the functionality for access to key features has already improved greatly in the last year or so.


+++ Rick ---


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>Of course I agree there are some apps that it doesn't make sense to transition to devices quite yet, such as apps requiring ultra-high-res large screens or multiple screens or for users who always need to increase font size on their PC screen, but nobody proposes moving those to devices until we get decent retina casting or other means of displaying big data without big screen real estate. Its close with bluetooth screens you can walk up to and use, but there's more to be done. Meantime it seems to me that any sort of app that used to be possible with FP2.x can be run far more attractively and powerfully on a device in 2015.