I saw someone post on a show your web app type thread the other day telling the developer to make his website an iphone app and sell it for 99cents. At first I was going to comment that it really didn't need to be an iphone app, and that it was fine as a website but then I thought about it and really thats the only way you'd get people to pay for the service.
Apple have trained people to pay 1 or 2 dollars for mobile applications, and thats great - but if you said to someone you need to pay a dollar to use this website they'd leave straight away.
So now you have the situation where it's in both the developer AND Apple's best financial interests to make native applications - how is the web on mobile going to come forward? What incentive does Apple have to make HTML5 run great on their devices when they earn a chunk of native app sales? Additionally, if they threw resources at it, they'd probably end up contributing a bunch of code back to Webkit which would immediately be used by their biggest competitor.
Apple have trained people to pay 1 or 2 dollars for mobile applications, and thats great - but if you said to someone you need to pay a dollar to use this website they'd leave straight away.
So now you have the situation where it's in both the developer AND Apple's best financial interests to make native applications - how is the web on mobile going to come forward? What incentive does Apple have to make HTML5 run great on their devices when they earn a chunk of native app sales? Additionally, if they threw resources at it, they'd probably end up contributing a bunch of code back to Webkit which would immediately be used by their biggest competitor.