LOL!

Of course Apple likes Apps. They're getting a 30% cut of every app that goes in the store and is not free. It's a cash cow. Which is WHY they are actively sabotaging the Web in iOS IMHO. But it won't last. Google is being much more open with the Web in Android, and Microsoft just announced at Build that Web applications can be packaged from the Web and offered in the Windows Store. Then there's FireFox OS which uses HTML/JS for everything from native apps all the way to Web hosted apps that are also accessible through their store (optionally). Everybody but apple is recognizing that the moment is behind the Web and developers are fed up having to manage x number of platforms to ship a product. Todays it's 2 main platforms and maybe 3 more wanna be's. If you want to be everywhere that's a sucky proposition that could be solved nicely if HTML was universally accepted.

And besides listening to Apple marketing dribble is hardly something any developer should care about unless your sole goal is to sell into that market. I use Apple products - i have an iPhone and just bought a Mac book pro, but I don't like their developer story or their marketing claims. Apple is many times worse than Microsoft was at their peak in terms of trying to manipulate and cajole the market. But there's also no denying that they have tremendous pull.

>> 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.

Google much less so than Apple. Google's business model isn't hardware like Apple's. Apple has to move product and the only way they can do that is to pimp the platform.

Google wants to sell advertising and they don't care whether it comes from the Web or from native apps. They don't make money on most Android phones sold except they Google branded one. They make money from the hooks of the Google OS has back into their data aquisition services that translate into ad and promotion revenue. This is why Google is putting a lot of effort into the HTML platform. Angular, Material Design, Polymer are all designed to work well on mobile devices and that stuff is very visible and very popular - Angular in particular. With the efforts going into these you can see that the focus of those Web platforms is to build very rich mobile experiences.

I'm not sure whether that's a sign of them wanting to go this direction or for them to just hedge their bets in case the industry goes that way in general.

I think the decision for this won't come from the vendors but from developers. The number of Web developers far outweighs the number of native developers especially if you split it up by platform. If you want your platform to win

If there's going to be a future winning 4GL language to tie it all together I think it'll be a Web based interface to make it happen.

But it'll take time. What we're talking about hasn't been possible with the Web for very long - maybe 3 years or so since HTML 5 got enough of a toe-hold and browsers were fast enough to manage rich interaction. Things will continue to improve in this space and catch up to native development in terms of performance and richness of tools available. There much more innovation in the JavaScript space than in the proprietary native vendor space and that IMHO will drive the future.


+++ Rick ---







>>> 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.
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>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.
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>>>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.
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>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/
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>... 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?
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>>>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.
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>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.
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>>>The reason for today's failures are mostly political not technical.
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>That's been true ever since the demise of the cross platform 4GL. ;-)