Will iPhone Give Native Apps a New Life?

This conversation has begun over at the Mozilla blog, started byMatthew Gertner: . . . 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... [read full story]