You don't get to make that comparison until 10 more years pass and people are still saying the same thing. Give the web a bit more time, it's tough to build responsive, native-feeling, frameworks on mobile, but the delta between web apps and native apps are narrowing every year. Soon that delta will be smaller than the cost of developing separate apps for ever-more devices. In all likelihood you have some web apps on your phone today that you don't realize are just web views.
If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now.
The fact that in today's "build software people want" world you need to do it three times, or at the very least in 3 different languages on the front-end is fucking crazy.
Now, the HTML5 problem will solve the platform. Especially with local storage and high performance browser graphics! Boom shaka-laka. Coming soon hopefully.
The problem after that is much more trivial - responsive layout. Can you really write an all purpose app that responds to desktop, and all shapes of mobile and tablet without having to think about each form factor individually?
>If Apple and Google put half as much effort into mobile web browsing as they did in proprietary platform development, we'd be further by now.
I doubt it. More likely we would have a bunch of browsers that followed an even more divergent set of standards.
Web standards are slow to improve because they involve getting a bunch of competing companies to agree to things, often things that are against their commercial interests. It's ridiculous for people to claim to support web standards but then complain about the slow pace. That is an inevitable part of the process of trying to get everybody in the world to agree on a single platform API that monopolises all user facing software. Native platforms move forwards more quickly because Google doesn't need to get permission from Apple and Mozilla and Microsoft before they add a new feature to Android. The web has to be a slow moving lowest-common-denominator type platform or it loses the only advantage it has, which is that it runs just about everywhere.
If you want a platform that is fast moving, exciting, and cutting edge then you don't want web standards at all, because web standards are exactly the opposite of those things, by design.
That's like saying no one will agree on HDMI, or some other interface. The standards are crippled. But look at opengl, java, and c as amazing cross platform technologies that revolutionized computing in some way. Saying the only way to do something cool is to build a walled garden sounds is such a recent point of view, as compared to cross platform development.
