There were a small number of great CD-ROMs back then. The Voyager Company did as much as was possible given the crappy hardware that existed.
Anyhow, I could come up with an equally harsh assessment of web apps as you did of native apps:
* web app discoverability sucks (seriously how much money is spent on SEO?)
* web apps constantly change on you or disappear when the shop is bought out
* web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims
* you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web (let's see how Stripe works out long term before we declare victory there)
* many apps lack basic features like site-wide search, working back/forwards buttons, working bookmarking due to bad Ajax use, incoherent and inconsistent UI, etc.
Now, I happen to like web app development better than native app development, but I'm not a big fan of triumphalism in any of its stripes. Heck, the vast majority of websites out there would work just fine (or better) as paper brochures or a rolodex.
The web will continue changing and evolving and the browser will only be one of many ways that it will be consumed. Native apps will be integrated with web services more and more over time.
Apple has done a spectacular job of monetizing small apps, Google is building a good infrastructure for ad-sponsored apps, I wouldn't discount their long term potential.
"I happen to like web app development better than native app development"
I find the distinction to pretty blurry, myself. If you look at Cappuccino, you could practically search and replace a few tokens and have your code natively compile in Cocoa.
As web applications become more complex, proper separation of concerns, like MVC, starts to become important. Once you do that, as seen with Cappuccino and echoed in many other frameworks like SproutCore Backbone to name a couple more, the process starts to very closely resemble native development.
We now have the web browser playing double duty. We want it to be a hyperlink document viewer and we want it to be a platform for applications. Personally, I would like to see the browser be only a platform for applications and let the hyperlink document viewer be one of the many applications you can run in the browser.
Smart companies and individuals don't spend much money on SEO, as most white-hat practices require long-term focus and black-hat practices can get you erased from the Internet. You can't do anything unless you're doing marketing, however marketing must be part of the product and can't be outsourced.
With that said, web apps go viral faster than anything else, that's because there's no barrier to entry. You don't have to be a member of the iPhone users club to try out links.
web app development can be a multilayered
nightmare of browser bugs and code shims
Compared to multi-platform development for OS X, iOS, Android, Symbian, WinMo 6, WinMo 7, Windows 7, Windows 8, Blackberry, Samsung Bada, Linux ; it's heaven like.
you pretty much need to sell your soul to a
bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web
Except Paypal or a bank are NOT in the same market as you are. They also don't control the platform you operate on. They couldn't suddenly one day decide that your product should be part of the OS, making their own alternative.
If you're getting screwed by Paypal, you're only losing some money. However, if you're getting screwed by Apple, you lose your product and business model.
Compared to multi-platform development for OS X,
iOS, Android, Symbian, WinMo 6, WinMo 7, Windows 7,
Windows 8, Blackberry, Samsung Bada, Linux ; it's
heaven like.
You make this sound much worse than it actually is. iOS is where the money is and Android is up and coming. All the others can be either ignored and served with a (funnily enough) web site.
Then there are libraries / frameworks that abstract all these platforms away or allow you to use a language that you're experienced in: MonoTouch, PhoneGap, Unity, etc.
Now, libraries don't fix all the problems and sometimes you will have to deal with the platform but they do take care of a whole lot.
As a long-term investment, it's a bad choice though. I still make money from web apps built in 2007, and there's a pretty good chance i 'll keep making it with incremental changes in the following years. I doubt i 'd say the same if i'd started with phone apps in the pre-iphone era.
As randomdata pointed out, I think this goes more to proving my point than yours. They did a lot of work to get to that point. Contrast that with "Tiny Wings" that showed up and started making a huge amount of money.
I'll grant you that it's more effort today than it was with an App, but an App platform provides an easier method of discovery [1], an easy method for billing and even an advertising platform. With the web this is all on you and the web is more ad focused so you're probably more likely to be competing with free.
[1] Random chance with the user entering the right google keywords vs doing a category search in the app store and knowing you can see everything in that category.
Not a good example. 37signals had a huge following long before Basecamp. Their success in web apps was largely from leveraging that existing fan base. Most developers do not have the luxury.
Anyhow, I could come up with an equally harsh assessment of web apps as you did of native apps:
* web app discoverability sucks (seriously how much money is spent on SEO?)
* web apps constantly change on you or disappear when the shop is bought out
* web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims
* you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web (let's see how Stripe works out long term before we declare victory there)
* many apps lack basic features like site-wide search, working back/forwards buttons, working bookmarking due to bad Ajax use, incoherent and inconsistent UI, etc.
Now, I happen to like web app development better than native app development, but I'm not a big fan of triumphalism in any of its stripes. Heck, the vast majority of websites out there would work just fine (or better) as paper brochures or a rolodex.
The web will continue changing and evolving and the browser will only be one of many ways that it will be consumed. Native apps will be integrated with web services more and more over time.
Apple has done a spectacular job of monetizing small apps, Google is building a good infrastructure for ad-sponsored apps, I wouldn't discount their long term potential.