The author mainly focuses on mobile devices. I would like to add that even on desktop, native apps feel way better than their web based counterparts. Switching from Google Reader to NetNewsWire, from GMail to Sparrow, Twitter web to Twitter desktop app, SoundCloud web to SoundCloud native app, are just some examples. Ideally, data synced on the web, with clients on the desktop seems like an ideal possibility to me. Or maybe its just me who thinks this way.
Well, you should use whatever rocks your boat. Personally, I think its a little weird that Twitter Web consumes a lot of CPU as compared to the Desktop app. As for GMail, I find switching between labels (on the web interface) very slow, if you have a ton of labels/emails. So instead of setting up Gears or something, I just started using a native app.
ChromeDeck is pretty great. It's an HTML5 TweetDeck app in the Chrome Web Store that feels almost native. Multicolumn layout for your lists, inline video / photos, and desktop notifications with sound.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbdpomandigafcibbm...
What native app do you use? I use Apple Mail since IMO it has the best IMAP support of the lot, but archiving and filing under labels is a pain. Apple's way is to use drag and drop, which doesn't rock my boat.
Mailplane rocks. It's more of an SSB than a pure native app like Twitter for Mac, but it has a lot of nice little integration points with Mac OS X.
It's not cheap, but it's well worth the price (its also due for a paid upgrade soon, IMO, as I have not paid anything beyond the first version three years ago).
That's an unfortunate side-effect of the Mac app store. It's too bad, because functional demos was one of the nice things about the Mac software ecosystem.
Give it a few days, that was literally only released last night, and they're still waiting for the ad supported version to be approved. Up until then it was in open beta.
"On mobile, as I see it there is no contest. Web apps make no sense."
Do you say that because of the expectation that to use a web app you have to have a working Internet connection?
[NB I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested, my current close-to-launch side project is a service that allows you to build data-aware HTML5 webapps for mobile devices - these work perfectly well offline]. :-)
The biggest argument for mobile apps tends to be their ability to interact with the phone. For example, my Gmail app will tell me in my notification bar that I have a new email, and Tweetdeck will tell me when someone replies to one of my tweets. To my admittedly limited knowledge of mobile phones this cannot be done by a web app.
I still wish you good luck, as most apps in wide use on the iPhone and Android simply shouldn't "have" to exist (apps for news sites, shopping carts, etc) because they can be done just as well, if not better through a web app. If you succeed, I might be able to buy my grocery shopping on my phone on the bus to work rather than being told I can't because I use Android and can't use the iPhone app.
I would say that the main points are performance, access to hardware apis, and - the most ignored one - ease of install.
There is no familiar way for users to install a web app (unless they are a bit tech savvy). My uncle adds favorites to its home screen to go to web pages, he knows that, and its impossible for him to think that a website is a website and if you add it to the home screen "turns out" to be like an application.
If a clearer interface was provided in the mobile phones, something like identifying webapps with a meta tag, or something, so that the phone could know and offer the user to install the app, the barrier for mobile webapps adoption could be lowered a lot.
I agree that "installing" an offline web app on something like the iPhone is a bit odd - largely because there is very little you have to do. You can just install it as a Bookmark or on the Home Screen (where it can have it's own logo etc. - like a normal app).
I'm more targeting getting structured (or semi structured) data onto a mobile device, possibly make the content editable and allow changes to be sync'ed back to the server to be shared with others or collected via an export or API.
e.g. I can take an Excel spreadsheet, turn it into an offline HTML 5 app, allow users to edit the data, sync all the changes and export it back out as a modified spreadsheet.
No, I say it because none of the points I mentioned are relevant on mobile. At the moment I'm never without good Internet access. The biggest advantage of web apps is the idea that wherever you have a modern browser and a net connection you get the same experience. But that isn't true on mobile since most sites have dedicated mobile interfaces which aren't as usable as their desktop equivalents due to hardware constraints. In addition, since I'm never without my mobile, a native app is by definition always available, negating much of the advantage of the ubiquitous web model.
On the other hand, I do expect my native apps to either sync or act as a client for net based services.
At the moment I use precisely zero web based apps on mobile with the exception of gmail, which I resort to only when searching since the iOS mail client search is useless.
Thanks - I misunderstood the point you were making.
On the point of interacting with the hardware, at least on iOS, you can get location data into your webapp and there are cunning ways of getting access to the camera.
