The App Store quickly became a lowest-bidder marketplace with flash-in-the-pan hits here and there and state lottery level probability of success. We jumped in

The App Store quickly became a lowest-bidder marketplace with flash-in-the-pan hits here and there and state lottery level probability of success. We jumped in and gave it an honest try in the education category. We soon realized we could make a far greater impact and have massively better control with equivalent web-based products. We can control the design, marketing, business model, interface, analytics and more. Right of the line the value proposition is enhanced by the fact that you can easily differentiate from a sea of crappy free mobile apps and we can communicate directly with our customers with depth and personal engagement. On iOS we had to deal with such nonsense as not being able to disable multitouch gestures frim the app (and only for the app, not globally). The use case being small children or developmentally disabled children, where multitouch gestures can range from a distraction to a usability nightmare. Anyhow, this is jut to echo some of what you said about web dev.