>> You'd be surprised how many apps in stores today are hyrid apps. All those hypbrid apps are a cry for the Web. Every one of those could/should be running as Web instead of being shoehorned into a native Webbrowser container.

Agree that hybrid and native is converging with a lot of so called native apps becoming hybrid- IOW tied into the local api and sqllite but using HTML for display.

>>Mind you if you have the resources and skills to build sophisticated mobile apps then by all means go for it. If you can take advantage of the platform to its fullest then it makes sense. Most business apps don't need that though. At best they need access to the camera, location and maybe sms, dialer and contacts. Most of these can be done today (oddly except for contacts) using Web technologies.

Steve Jobs agreed in 2006: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/07/11/app-store-at-6-how-steve-jobs-biggest-blunder-became-one-of-apples-greatest-strengths/

... but did you see the Apple keynote for developers today? Swift (for writing native Apple apps) is going open source and apps were compared to the arrival of electricity and the invention of the microscope and telescope. Seems Apple likes the idea that "there's an app for that" including the News app going out onto devices with iOS9 to replace news websites with a custom collection based on your interests and news embedded more deeply in the OS. Plus there's a search API to make it easy to embed search in your apps. Not as good as Google Now by the sound of it, but another reason not to use a browser. Serious question: if search and news and shopping and making reservations and newsgroups and utilities all are apps that talk to each other, what is a browser for again?

>>I keep saying if you could get a well pinned app that behaves like a hybrid shell does, there would be very little benefit to writing a hybrid app. If you could run an app off the Web with locally cached data and resources pulled down to the client you can do away with all the app infrastructure crap. The standards for this exist and are implemented by most browsers - with the big exception of Safari on iOS.

Apart from customer preference, trouble is that web apps would allow presentation of competing devices (e.g. Winphone) as a credible alternative that runs the same apps, or could cause businesses to treat devices and OS as a commodity. Google and Apple are working hard to create reasons to prefer their device and realistically we need to expect prevalent OS vendors to protect their patch.

>>The reason for today's failures are mostly political not technical.

That's been true ever since the demise of the cross platform 4GL. ;-)