> I'd be much happier with mobile dev if the situation was more like that of developing for the web - use any language you want as long as it can output HTML to

> I'd be much happier with mobile dev if the situation was more like that of developing for the web - use any language you want as long as it can output HTML to be presented in the browser On the server, that's definitely true. On the client, it's basically the same situation w/r/t languages. But this is a client/server distinction, not a native/web distinction. Clients are just inherently coupled to the APIs that they use. Servers aren't so much. The coupling in languages reflects this. > If all the platform vendors had standardised on an API in say c as web browsers or unix have, we'd have a much more convincing case for mobile taking over the world and competing with the web That's an interesting point (although we'll then be totally locked to a particular platform/language on the client) and I think the web will eventually win. But not for a while. At some point, the rate of progress on native will decrease and the advantages of standardization (cost, mostly) will overcome the disadvantages (lack of progress). It'll be interesting to see how the manafacturers adapt to that. I suspect that Google will do better than Apple.