It seems that no matter where you go in the mobile development/marketing circles you always find people who are VERY passionate on their views on the future of mobile apps...whether one is better, faster, offers more features, cheaper, has a better business model, etc. My personal opinion on the matter is that there is room for both and there are instances when most companies need both and others where you need one or the other. Where most companies make their mistake is that they don't have a mobile strategy, but that is a sermon for another Sunday. This past week, RIM made a pretty bold statement/pot-shot at Apple in regards to this topic. Liam Cassidy over at Gigaom wrote a very interesting article, Poking Holes in RIM’s Anti-Apple Rhetoric, where he definitely gives RIM some serious food for thought.
"Let’s think back to 2007 when Jobs demonstrated the iPhone to a stunned WWDC. At that time, Apple only endorsed a single way of getting new functionality onto the iPhone - via web apps."
"It’s an easy answer: Native apps provide improvements in performance and storage; they work offline; and they are better at remembering where you last left off. Native apps can also exploit the platform’s built-in technology, such as the iPhone’s camera or Location Services (Twitter’s website, for example, always gets my location wrong, but the official Twitter app, hooking-into iOS’s Location Services, never fails to figure out where I am.) "
"At best, they belie a serious lack of understanding of the tablet/mobile device market as it exists today"
Now look at the mobile ecosystem and get back to me Balsillie.