First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice This is not wrong, in fact with Windows Phone and Firefox OS it'll soon become 3 x or 4 x, and more

First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice This is not wrong, in fact with Windows Phone and Firefox OS it'll soon become 3 x or 4 x, and more importantly compared to the web you have to make that choice of which to target, test and support - with web software it doesn't come up. The landscape for x-platform software is pretty limited, and having to use a framework like phonegap is far from ideal and leaves you beholden to that framework author for updates, performance, updating for new UIs like iOS 7, fixing bugs etc. That's not an enviable situation to be in and you shouldn't just dismiss it with a wave of the hand. Consumers are often hostile to apps made with html frameworks across platforms as well, because the performance isn't always good, and the platform makers are hostile to them because they break their ecosystem monopoly. You don’t get a choice of languages; if you hate both Java and ObjC, get another job. I do think it's a shame that the providers of these platforms lock them down to APIs in their chosen languages/frameworks - Apple have been getting better on this, but really there is no good reason to ban alternative browsing engines, and on all these platforms the platform vendors' aim is to lock you into their development tools, process and API, ideally to the exclusion of all others. Apple could have given webkit/x-platform development equal footing with native, but instead they have hindered it with substandard performance compared to the built-in browser. Because for a market that "can't make money", they just paid $10 billion to developers. I'd be very interested to see the breakdown on which developers have made all that money; I suspect it would be heavily skewed towards shady purveyors of skinner-box games like Zynga and big name game studios with lots of marketing behind them. It is possible for an indy to make money, but it's far harder than you might think depending on the segment you're in. I agree 'You can't make money' is patently false though, you can make money on mobile apps. In my experience though there's far more certain money in making them than in selling them. My biggest complaints about mobile development are the capricious and arbitrary rules and judgements on whether apps get onto the device or not. That serves no-one but Apple/Google, and in the long term I suspect will doom their platform compared to more open alternatives like the web. Apple and Google want to control their consumers absolutely and take a cut on transactions, and use their tight grip on the app stores to make this a reality. I don't see mobile overtaking the web though, quite the reverse in the long term. Coming from server-side development mobile app development can be frustrating because of the power the platform vendors exert over every stage of the process. That's not something to celebrate or paper over, it's a serious problem. Just to take one example - Apple has banned developers from exploring any other payment system than their own for selling digital goods. That's a serious crimp on innovation, costs the customers and developers, and guarantees that Apple has a stranglehold on a huge emerging market and collects a vig on every transaction, to the detriment of competitors of theirs like Amazon and customers who just want to buy a book in their kindle app. Why should a single corporation control which books I read just because of the device I bought? At least he points out that the situation on the browser side technically is equally broken and in need of improvement, with only one language available for client-side development.