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Are Web Apps an Endangered Species?

The launch of the iPhone App Store got me thinking about the future of web apps. After all, Apple had initially announced that the SDK for the iPhone would be Safari. In other words, iPhone applications would be web apps. As a proponent of using web technologies for application development, I rejoiced. The approach is also sensible in that it solves many of the tricky issues associated with running native apps on a consumer device. Years of practical experience with sandboxed web apps have made them extremely safe, if not perfectly so. And the barriers to entry for developers are lower because so many people are familiar with web development.

It didn’t take long, however, for Apple to bow to pressure to release a native SDK, and they have done so with much fanfare. Considering Steve Jobs’s history for obfuscating his strategic plans, it’s quite possible that the whole “Safari as SDK” idea was just a smokescreen. On the hand, Apple’s ongoing work implementing HTML5’s application-centric feature and the inclusion in the iPhone 1.1.3 firmware of a feature to add Web Clips to the phone’s home page suggest that a web-based SDK is still in the works.

But does this even make sense? One of the biggest advantages of web apps is that they can be run from any computer equipped with a web browser (i.e. any computer not housed in the Smithsonian). This is clearly a moot point in the case of mobile devices since by their very nature they are with you at all times. Accessing apps on someone else’s computer is a dying practice anyway. When I first arrived in Prague, there was seemingly an internet cafe on every street corner. They are now few and far between as the population has become affluent enough for widespread private computer ownership. And a growing proportion of computer sales are for laptops that obviate the need to use another machine when on the road.

The other argument for web apps is that they enable the same code to be run on a multitude of different devices. Once again, this premise deserves close examination. Ajax-based apps require a lot of tweaking and testing to run properly in different browsers. Diverse form factors like mobile phones and TV set-top boxes require further customization. And while the open web crowd may froth at the mouth at the very notion, it isn’t clear why it would be in Apple’s (or any other manufacturer’s) interest to encourage development of portable apps when they can lock developers into their ecosystem.

Meanwhile, tools for web app development continue to lag behind those for native apps  (XCode, Visual Studio, etc.). Apple’s own online productivity suite, launched with its new MobileMe service, is a case in point. They’ve managed to create an impressive user experience, but you have to be a virtual rocket scientist to achieve this with Ajax techniques and tools. It’s much easier to use a proprietary framework like Flex which is designed for cross-browser compatibility and offers visual user interface design tools and the like.

As computing’s center of gravity shifts away from general-purpose desktop machines to mobile devices, set-top boxes, game consoles and the like, are native apps poised to stage a comeback?