Take a look at open web apps / chrome apps / phonegap / the Firefox OS project (I work on the latter). The line between apps and websites is getting thinner by the day, and getting very close to being non existent.
Also the 'apps are an island' comment is quite specific to iOS, Android has a very elegant system for allowing apps to interact with each other, one which the web is adopting (web intents/activities).
The basic premise is the wrong way round, web apps will adopt native functionality (web api's) and native performance (which already good enough for most use cases), they will (and can often already do) work offline.
'Native' apps are almost by definition going to have to be rewritten for every platform and will never have the same introspection and interconnectedness as the web.
Which platform do you think is going to fix its disadvantages first? seems obvious to me.
I think the key question is where will the consumers go? Android is more open than iOS, but devs continue to build for iOS first b/c that's where all the users are at, especially the paying users.
I only know a little bit about the Firefox OS project, but if you give control to the OEMs, won't you run into the same problem that Android has with fragmentation?
On one hand, I don't want to be naive. Everything on the desktop has moved into the browser. That happened a lot faster than I though. Everything in mobile is moving 2x the speed of desktop, so will everything move onto a browser in mobile eventually too? The key difference between the desktop and mobile is that there isn't hardware ubiquity. Every computer has a keyboard and a mouse. But the hardware buttons aren't standardized across Apple and Android. The home button is crucial on the iPhone and same with Android. Would either of those platforms ever cede control over that button to a browser? Otherwise, you've got to put that functionality on the screen which takes up space.
We will never convince the entire world to settle on a single device, Androids biggest 'problem' is a large part of why it is completely dominating the mobile market (although I dont disagree that OEM customisation can be annoying).
Apps dont have control over the home button on iOS / Android, I dont reallyknow what you mean 'cede control' (unless you are thinking Firefox OS runs inside Android / iOS as an app? it doesnt, its a full OS)
Both iOS and Android allow apps interacting with each other. iOS has URL schemes, Android has Intents which are obviously far more elegant. There are tricks you can play to have apps intercept web page visits on Android [1], but other than that, web apps are disconnected from native apps.
That's ... one way to characterize Intent Filters. They enable, more or less, exactly what you talk about in the article, as I mentioned in my other comment.
I disagree with the 'very small subset', especially when we are talking about advancements going forward. There is very little to nothing that wont be possible to build using web tech.
Comments
Take a look at open web apps / chrome apps / phonegap / the Firefox OS project (I work on the latter). The line between apps and websites is getting thinner by the day, and getting very close to being non existent.
Also the 'apps are an island' comment is quite specific to iOS, Android has a very elegant system for allowing apps to interact with each other, one which the web is adopting (web intents/activities).
The basic premise is the wrong way round, web apps will adopt native functionality (web api's) and native performance (which already good enough for most use cases), they will (and can often already do) work offline.
'Native' apps are almost by definition going to have to be rewritten for every platform and will never have the same introspection and interconnectedness as the web.
Which platform do you think is going to fix its disadvantages first? seems obvious to me.
I think the key question is where will the consumers go? Android is more open than iOS, but devs continue to build for iOS first b/c that's where all the users are at, especially the paying users.
I only know a little bit about the Firefox OS project, but if you give control to the OEMs, won't you run into the same problem that Android has with fragmentation?
On one hand, I don't want to be naive. Everything on the desktop has moved into the browser. That happened a lot faster than I though. Everything in mobile is moving 2x the speed of desktop, so will everything move onto a browser in mobile eventually too? The key difference between the desktop and mobile is that there isn't hardware ubiquity. Every computer has a keyboard and a mouse. But the hardware buttons aren't standardized across Apple and Android. The home button is crucial on the iPhone and same with Android. Would either of those platforms ever cede control over that button to a browser? Otherwise, you've got to put that functionality on the screen which takes up space.
'fragmentation isnt a problem, its a fact'
We will never convince the entire world to settle on a single device, Androids biggest 'problem' is a large part of why it is completely dominating the mobile market (although I dont disagree that OEM customisation can be annoying).
Apps dont have control over the home button on iOS / Android, I dont reallyknow what you mean 'cede control' (unless you are thinking Firefox OS runs inside Android / iOS as an app? it doesnt, its a full OS)
Both iOS and Android allow apps interacting with each other. iOS has URL schemes, Android has Intents which are obviously far more elegant. There are tricks you can play to have apps intercept web page visits on Android [1], but other than that, web apps are disconnected from native apps.
[1] Intent Filters: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Inten...
That's ... one way to characterize Intent Filters. They enable, more or less, exactly what you talk about in the article, as I mentioned in my other comment.
>The line between apps and websites is getting thinner by the day, and getting very close to being non existent.
For a very small subset of "apps". There are still plenty of things that would be hard or impossible to do in a web app.
I disagree with the 'very small subset', especially when we are talking about advancements going forward. There is very little to nothing that wont be possible to build using web tech.