[dewitt]

Fair question. I just posted a similar response in the comment below. Specially to your point here, it's because Tweetbot is actually the exception, not the rule, in that it arguably is part of the web.

The vast majority of native mobile apps are not. See http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/paid-apps for a good list of counter-examples.

[benaiah]

I agree wholeheartedly. I do personally prefer the web for application delivery from a developer's standpoint, and I find it quite simple to create sites that function well on a mobile form factor. It's curious, then, that more don't exist. I'm no hyper-talented guru, and my apps are reasonably representative of most light-workload thin-client apps, so I'm unsure of the problem.

The biggest problem I've found with mobile apps built with browser technology, personally, is that they often give none of the affordances of a native app and none of the affordances of the web. They become so obsessed with poorly aping native technologies* that they often fail to play to their strengths - things like deep-linking, tabbed browsing, lightweight usage, hypermedia, and so on. I don't really get it.

I suspect that the reason is due to the fact that people who are good enough to write a mobile web app that works well are simply not doing so, either because that's not what they do or because they prefer working in native technologies. Meteor+Bootstrap+Hammer+basic googling gets you head and shoulders above most people in the mobile webapp world, but that's not the status quo, despite those being some of the easiest-to-use frameworks I've ever worked with in the web space.

I suspect, but I really just don't know. shrugs

* Yes, some are as good as mobile apps, and it's not very difficult to be vastly better than the vast majority of mobile web apps, but good web app UXs remain rare birds for whatever reason

[Tobani]

Nobody claimed that mobile apps were all part of the web. The argument was in the context of cdixon argument (more people using the native versions of webby things on mobile than browser versions), maybe we should consider those native apps as part of the web.

The "Doc McStuffins" game is hardly a counter-example in that it doesn't replace anything that would be considered part of the web. The argument wasn't that all mobile apps are "the web."