[beryllium]

No. Native apps won't die.

There seems to be an ebb and flow between "thin client" and "thick client" computing. Right now we're leaning heavily toward the "thin client" realm, with the emphasis on "Cloud this" and "Web that"; however, it's entirely possible that something will happen to bring that remote compute capacity back to the local device for the sake of efficiency.

And even now, there are reasons to compute locally in a native language instead of remotely via an abstraction. Some of those reasons (speed, primarily) are beginning to be mitigated by new technologies, but the reasons will likely always exist for why a native app can be a better solution than a thin client style implementation.

Probably what we'll see is an emphasis on APIs and intercommunication - this gives companies the power to do a lot of logic server-side, and just roll native apps for things that are difficult to do on the server. Implementations like Dropbox, Evernote, Wunderlist, and Netflix are good examples of this bridge between philosophies.

[n8henry]

"Some of those reasons (speed, primarily) are beginning to be mitigated by new technologies"

Can you enlighten me about any of these? I feel ignorant.

[beryllium]

Well, think of the games - typically they need raw and low-level access to hardware in order to optimize the framerate and gameplay experience.

But there are several technologies on the market right now that can actually deliver such experiences with the rendering done off-device (albeit with some extra latency).

This is an example of new technologies mitigating the drawbacks to building non-native/remote-processing apps.