Sergey Brin sees them converging in the not too distant future.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin
went further. “These models are likely to converge in the future. And not the too distant future,” Brin says.
He notes that during the keynote today, we got a glimpse at how the HTML model is coming along. Web apps are now able to go offline, and they can have richer graphics thanks to HTML5. “It’s getting similar to app frameworks,” he says. He also notes that there are benefits to using web apps versus native apps, such as the lack of installation, and certain aspects of security. ”It’s headed in a positive direction, but these are fairly recent developments,” Brin says.
Brin acknowledges that for now, the market is proving the need for native apps. The current generation of cellphones aren’t quite powerful enough, and HTML5 isn’t quite developed enough, he notes. Pichai also notes that screen sizes on mobile devices makes native apps more enticing as well.
As I keep saying mobile web will just be web in a few years. The mobile ecosystem today is similar to the PC ecoystem in the early 80s. There will always be some native apps just as there are desktop apps now, but future web apps will run on many devices such as computers, mobile phones, tablet devices, TVs etc.