[mikeash]

It's an awful way to program. You don't get a choice of languages. There's no debugger. There isn't even an easily accessible console log to print to. It's like trying to assemble a watch, in the dark, while wearing mittens. You can do it, but it's not terribly fun.

There's a reason that there was a massive developer outcry at the "sweet solution" of HTML5 apps, causing Apple to release a native SDK instead.

[simscitizen]

You can actually attach desktop Safari's Web Inspector to both Mobile Safari and webviews running on a remote iPhone and get debugging, console logging, etc. The native stuff still has much better tooling, but the situation with webviews isn't as dire as you imagine.

[mikeash]

Oh, that's nice! Looks like it's new with iOS 6. So, it was awful for a long time, but that is indeed a substantial improvement.