Take yourself back to 2007. The first iPhone was released… The media, love to claim that this device changed everything. One thing everyone seems to forget is that at first, we, as developers, could not make applications for the iPhone. There was no app store. There were no apps.

What was Apple doing? They were pushing for the web. They said, “Just make a web app”. They had their ‘add to home screen’ functionality (which is yet to be duplicated by other manufacturers, but it REALLY needs to be). 

The problem with this solution was that developers wanted access to cool stuff. We wanted to play with the camera, the location services, the address book etc.

Now imagine this scenario. Apple improve mobile safari at this point to include access to all the native functionality and features. This would be what Mozilla are trying to do with their WebAPIs. Or perhaps what W3C are trying to do with the web applications API. They also add hardware acceleration and key performance improvements at this point. They make web apps, look and behave like native apps.

Now what would other manufacturers have on their devices? A decent brower that enabled developers to have access to the native functionality of the device. Now remeber, the beauty of the web is that any device anywhere can access it. There are only two requirements, a browser & an internet connection.

But what did Apple do? They released a native SDK in their very own language of choice Objective-C. Developers then started making native iOS apps. Only iOS devices have access to these tools and services. Native apps aren’t new, in fact they are old. So what was the big deal? The App Store, that is what changed everything.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously there are still the type of tools, that can’t work well using high level languages. Native apps will always be with us for heavy duty software. But for angry birds? For the type of app your mum has downloaded and installed. Do these really need to be native? No.

What we need now is device manufacturers to develop decent browsers with native funcionality APIs and the “Add to home screen” functionality.