[Ronsenshi]

I'd say yes. We've been down that path before and i strongly believe that native apps are needed in a relatively low number of cases when you either need all the performance in your app or when you're dealing with some very tricky input. The rest should be absolutely fine with apps built with browser technologies and adapted to OS (with Apache Cordova or whatnot). Just as with WhatsApp - that app is pretty straightforward and it could be easily written in HTML5. It doesn't require heavy computation, it doesn't have any complex input methods, it doesn't need to deal with local storage etc.

Web allows us to create one app and with tiniest of modifications that app could be available on all of the major platforms. Don't you think this is by far better future than multitude of various platforms and versions of those platforms (see WP, Android) when you'll need a team of developers just to finish multiple versions of your app?