The article offers little value, but I'm always interested in conversation about this topic so I'll add my experiences here: I'm on a contract with a company t

The article offers little value, but I'm always interested in conversation about this topic so I'll add my experiences here: I'm on a contract with a company that has run the full gambit of mobile strategies over the past year. They started out by outsourcing native development of their mobile app overseas. After about 9 months of development they determined that for whatever reason, whether it be communication issues or poor product planning, the apps weren't where they wanted them to be so they decided to do a complete 180 and go with the HTML5 approach, which is what I've been working on. We decided to go with the Sencha Touch framework because it's the most complete native-style mobile framework out there today. We've managed to recreate the native apps in just over 2 months, which is impressive considering it was a rewrite from scratch. A week ago we submitted to the app store and it was approved by Apple. Performance on the iPhone 4s is surprisingly close to that of a native app, which gives me hope for the future of the phonegap approach. Phones and javascript engines are only going to get more powerful, so in a few years this experience should be ubiquitous for most people. However, we're at a point in time where there are a lot of older devices, mostly running Android, that don't run HTML5 apps as nicely as they do native ones. For instance, our app is very usable on a 2 year old Android, but scrolling isn't very smooth and transitions are mostly non-existant due to the fact that hardware accelerated CSS3 animations aren't supported. I should mention that our app is mostly data (it's a productivity/collaboration app), so that helps. I'm primarily a web developer but I've started diving into native iOS development for a side project where UX is more important. Native development isn't as bad as I had feared, but it certainly takes more time. If you're not very good at it, you'll end up with an app that really performs no better than what could have been done using HTML5. Bad code is bad code, no matter what it's written in. What keeps me from being sold on the native approach is the increasing fragmentation we're seeing on the marketplace. The thought of having to maintain three separate code-bases for Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile gives me cold sweats. Sure, there are strategies for sharing the basic logic between the three, but not nearly as turn key as simply dumping the code into Phonegap like we've done with our Sencha app. In my humble opinion, given that we've seen near native performance on bleeding edge devices, I think that native apps will only be necessary for games and intensive content creation apps like iMovie and iWork. The vast majority of the apps out there today would work just as well as HTML5 apps.