>>>That's the same argument that was used with desktop apps 15+ years ago - and that never prevailed either.
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>15 years ago there wasn't a displacing technology event. I'm not aware of displacing technology on desktops or desktop OS this century, but phones and mobile devices represent a huge displacement, effectively leaving out the previously dominant OS vendor and many of the "truths" we all knew about development. It may be that horses no longer are needed for carriages.
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>>>There's a place for both. And I'm certain that the Web will win out in the end. It maybe some sort of hybrid solution (which already has a large market share for 'apps').
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>Gartner predicts that 50% of apps will be hybrid by 2016 and other say they already are... but the coalescence is between native and hybrid. Many "native" apps already are hybrid if you look closely.
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>If I were writing an app for devices in 2015 it'd be a hybrid: no point reinventing a UI wheel if there's already one. The only risk is that if Node.js or Gulp.js or whatever undergoes the modern liking for frenetic change and reinvention, you can end up back on the same Rube Goldberg treadmill. Which is why a 4GL makes better sense: in the good old days people could watch apps glide across the surface like a swan rather than acting as if the purpose of it all is the flailing beneath the surface.

If it was all that easy we'd see it. Nobody is really doing it effectively.

Xamarin has Xamarin Forms which sort of works, but it's super generic. The whole point of building Apps is that you take advantage of the native environment and if you use 4gl you invariably code for the lowest common denominator.

Again I also want to clarify that I don't think major vendors are going to abandon native, but if you are building non consumer style applications, building an app is utter overkill. As a developer you go on the rube goldberg treadmill trying to keep your versions up to date with the OS and the breaking changes and patches and all that other crap that goes with native. Side loading remains something that all vendors make very difficult. In order for it to be easy to use you have to be in a store - either the full store or an isolated corporate store. But for devs that means a lot of extra administration overhead. You also have to test extensively on each of these platforms. With Web apps there's much less of that aspect.

Clearly we're on different sides of the fence... All I know is that developers today are struggling with a multi-platform native world much more than they are struggling with Web technologies. And that I don't see changing anytime soon.

I'm done with this - I think we've ground this point - and our disagreements as far as we can without rehashing.

+++ Rick ---