@Jules, the two biggies are definitely the economics, and that the web doesn’t have a good “long tail” or niche model and the perceptual performance. I feel like the last one can be fixed, but it’s a big, big deal. The first one, obviously, is a lot tougher.

@Angel, I love the direction Silverlight took. For it’s extra functionality, it stuck with the browser model and went with a “higher trust” option. With Windows Phone 7, your apps are still all done in Silverlight and in theory, portable to the web.

@leef, yeah, the finding apps (and selling them) is the hard part. I feel like there’s a market there but it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve. It’s really interesting to see how easily people on the iPhone jumped into the app-buying spree. I think there’s just a perception wall that what’s in the browser should be free and what I take with me, desktop/phone, I have to pay for. that sucks.

@Jon I completely agree about a bunch of your points, especially the look and feel. Native apps do look and feel better. But is that something that can’t be overcome?

@Joeflash, we need to do a parody of those commercials. I wonder if we can do that for MAX .

@Fadzlan, I like the web deployment model (put it on a server, it’s up), I like the cross-platform nature of web applications, I like the fact that there’s no walled garden to web applications, I like the flexibility of web development. All of those are why I like web apps over native apps. And I’m talking about both Flash and HTML, not just Flash on mobile devices.

=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com

I know that you are a web developer and you might not like this native “movement” (hate is a strong word though, but well… to each his own), but to your audience I think they need more reason to agree with you rather than its because you hate it.

As for me, there is one advantage of web over native, which is platform agnostic. However, it simply does not have good monetization yet for niche products. And when you talk about Flash for mobile, at this moment, there is only Android. From what I’ve read so far, it probably practical on high end devices so far. That almost rules out Flash for mobile, at least for now.

Since the mobile web advantage is not so strong, at least for now, and the fact that native had a lot of advantage (access to the wealth of API by the platform owner).

I think what we’re going to see is not so much the death of web RIAs, but a refining of them, making use of faster browsers, serious graphics acceleration & bigger screen real-estate, which is an area in which smart phones and compact tablet devices can’t compete. I think what we’re going to see is a proliferation of publishing mediums for Flash apps.

As soon as all the Android OS and Windows 7 Mobile-enabled tablets finally hit the market at the end of this year, the reign of iOS devices will end, and developing for them will be just like for any another corner market. And when that happens, Flash will, once again be everywhere, truly fulfilling the decade-long promise, first by Macromedia and now by Adobe, of not just a browser-agnostic, but a truly screen-ubiquitous development and publishing platform. Developers already build Flex apps for both browser (Flash Player) and desktop (AIR) experiences. Very soon it will be a given that many apps will be developed for even more mediums, even more devices, with the flexibility to publish once (just one AIR app), and have the application dynamically adapt itself at runtime to whatever device is running it — whether it be a desktop/laptop machine, a tablet/netbook device, or a smart phone.

And for that reason, I no longer consider myself a web developer, an RIA developer, or a device developer.

Like the Molson commercial …

I.
Am.
A.
Flash.
Platform.
Developer.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be one.

Peace.

Any web-appstore that is only found by navigating to it in a browser is fail compared to having it as a default non removable part of the OS like Apple did.

I transitioned to Flex and Flash due to frustration with cross browser concerns and lack of scalability of code complexity using traditional web technologies. “HTML5″ looks better but negligibly so.

Having worked in this camp for 3 years now I’m sick of the platform. Yes it remains a good alternative for RIA to traditional web technologies. But all it’s got on Silverlight is ubiquity which is bound to wane. And when you’re talking about the mobile platform (SL too) each participant has provided much better tooling from languages, to APIs, to HIG, to component kits than Adobe.

Who doesn’t want CLR or JVM languages like C#, F#, Scala, Clojure, Java, or Python or Ruby ports? Adobe can’t even implement the remainder of the respectable ES4 specification which had a working reference implementation:

http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf

Microsoft and Apple have much better applied experience building GUIs and Google deploying clean APIs contrasted with bloated mx.core.UIComponent accompanied by an plethora of lesser implementation details that should not have passed any code review. mx.olap.IOLAPCubeImpl…really???

On a fundamental level hosted runtimes also break expectations of user interaction. Flash TextField and right click are cases in point. FTE added undo and redo but that’s just one subtle behaviour. Have you not experienced the pain of AIR on Mac? Where’s Services in the App menu!? Help menu?!

So why complain about native? Same reason web standards kids complain about Flash? Barrier to entry? Is it really about cross deployment? At expense to developer enjoyment of tools like Scala? At expense to quality?

In personal practice I almost always prefer Cocoa apps over Air equivalents and am actively learning Android.

1) Native apps run based on the performance of the device they are on and thus run smoother and end up with fewer performance bottlenecks. Console gaming systems are a perfect example of this. All their “applications” for all intents and purposes work perfectly on the system they were intended to be built on with scalability a non-issue. Where as building to an operating environment leaves scalability to the mercy of hardware manufacturers. I can’t find 1 app on Android or iPhone that works as fast or as flawless as their previous iteration counterparts (Android is notorious for this, and the iPhone to a lesser extent).

2) While a good portion of the Smartphones out there are web enabled or web dependent, rarely ever do we have consistent or persistent access (i.e. – signal drops, etc.) so apps need to run without dependencies as far-reaching as web-only apps. I can’t have a phone that is so web-dependent that simple or even somewhat expended functions of it are handicapped by lack of a connection. I’m sure a number of people would tend to agree on this point.

3) Integrating the experience is probably the largest hurdle. Right now the experience on most Smartphone devices are either a) so closed-source as to create a simple but locked-in experience or are b) so open-source as to provide a fragmented experience. I don’t have a solution for this one but I imagine there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere.

If Smartphones adopted something closer to Chrome OS but offered an offline operating environment (a mixture akin to marrying the iPhone and Android) we could have a much more optimal solution to the concerns you have. I would love to see AIR apps flourish on all the open platforms, and I’d love Google to make Android a more unified system while retaining it’s current open-source philosophy.

I’m sure there are other issues or even some counter point to the above, just my two cents.