I understand why this is happening; application developers want to regain control of the stack and of content sales - Facebook especially wants to bring its app infrastructure with micropayments to iPhone without giving Apple its cut.

However, web apps were tried before - the original iPhone, for example - and were overwhelmingly underused and rejected by users. Has that changed? Possibly, but until we see the next crop of webapps we may not know. Personally, I feel that there is a certain irrational preference for having an app installed on your device, where it won't change or update automatically and will be accessible offline (even if you can't do anything useful with it).

Having said that, web apps have expanded and done quite well in the PC world - the idea of a native Facebook desktop client is laughable, and I'd guess that most average users use a web app for email.

It'll be interesting to see how this battle goes.

everyone brings up the example its been tried before, but hardware was a different story back then. mobile hardware is coming to a point where it will be able to run webapps no problem, its just going to take some amazing apps to make people change the mindset of opening up an app for every little thing, rather than staying in one app.. and switching bookmarks/tabs.

native facebook app is not that laughable, apple people tend to like their native apps example:twitter. I'm not the right person to ask since I prefer everything in the browser but I can see it happening.

Right now, targeting all the different browsers or all the different native platforms out there is tedious.

You could imagine that android will slowly slip towards Chrome NACL apps, with 'native' android apps becoming deprecated and then disappearing.

And then someone will make a NACL-on-the-cloud thing like Opera Mini for everybody else.

What NACL needs is a platform that runs in it that is basically a browser in the NACL so its easy to code for and target...