My day job is leading teams that build native and web versions of applications for clients, so it’s strange how much I agree with the sentiment, except for the

My day job is leading teams that build native and web versions of applications for clients, so it’s strange how much I agree with the sentiment, except for the world “replace”. Steve Jobs’ original iPhone announcement gets brought up a lot. You don’t release an entire development platform in a couple months as a course correction. They were working on a native SDK before the first iPhone launch. The talk about developing web apps as being the primary way to develop on mobile was a bit of face saving and Jobs style misdirection since the SDK was delayed. Native apps will never go away, because mobile platform owners can’t wait years until their hardware features are accessible through standardized web interfaces. That said I agree that too many mobile apps out there should have been made as a website. Also many digital experiences take just seconds or minutes of interaction to be meaningful, so the overhead of App Store reviews and publishing is total overkill. About 80% of apps I have on my phone are not used daily and just taking up space. However web apps historically have been painfully negligent in persisting user data, and lost some trust among non technical users in my experience.