I love the web. I love web development, I love web applications, and most importantly I loved where we were going with web applications. I was obviously a huge proponent of rich Internet applications and capturing a better user experience inside of the browser. Combine a great user experience with all of the good things about running in the browser (deployment, ubiquity, cross-platform, free publishing) and I thought that was a winning combination.

Then the App Store came along. Now everything is about standalone mobile applications. It feels like the web has taken a backseat as developers plunge head first into building native applications and users download them in droves. What bugs me the most is that I’m the same way. Most of the applications I use on my phone have perfectly good browser equivalents but I use the native app.

Dancing With Wolves

So what the hell happened? I think it comes down to two things. One, the app store provided a much better economic model for developers. One problem with the web was the downward pressure it put on the economics of content. Actual dollars were replaced with eyeballs and people started giving away the content and making money on advertising. (Think about how this affects Google, the ultimate web company; With revenue driven by advertising, they get a cut. With revenue driven by the App Store, Apple gets a cut.) With the App Store, developers can go back to charging directly for stuff they create instead of giving it away. It’s also insanely easy. They don’t have to worry about taking a credit card, setting up payments, or anything else that developers don’t want to worry about. They just have to build software, set a price, and the checks come in. That’s incredibly compelling. Especially if you’re doing development in your free time as a hobby. Now you can easily get paid for it without having to do any of the business tasks that might bog you down if you tried to do it on your own. That frictionless entry has changed the game for a lot of developers and created a huge supply of native mobile applications.

But that doesn’t explain the consumer demand for applications. I think that lies in user experience of applications. Prior to the explosion in mobile apps, we were getting close to a native-like user experience with RIAs in the browser. The components were better, the user interactions like drag-and-drop were appearing, and we were tackling problems like offline access directly in the HTML5 spec. Even the browsers were one-upping each other to be faster so we could get closer to native performance. The gap between a desktop experience and an in-browser experience was closing quickly.

Then quality mobile devices came along and changed everything. Instead of a mouse pointer we were dealing with fingers. Instead of worrying about offline access we had a ton of new functions on the phone including built-in GPS, accelerometer, camera, and a compass. The fastest and best (and in some cases only) way to take advantage of these new features was with native applications. Furthermore, the web experience was very much stuck in the old “pointer” mode. Mobile Safari on the iPhone made HUGE improvements to the mobile browsing experience, but nearly all of the websites were built for big screens and mouse pointers. Using the mobile browser on the iPhone (or any smartphone) is a lot of zooming and dragging. Even worse, some of the things we worked so hard on when it came to RIAs, like drag-and-drop, didn’t work the same way (or at all) and became more of an annoyance than a great feature.

So almost overnight all of the user interface paradigms the web had moved towards were rendered useless for this generation of mobile browsers. There were some initial attempts at fixing the issue, the best example is iUI by Joe Hewitt, but most people moved towards native apps. With better access to all of the new features, who could blame them?

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

So what does this mean for Flash developers? To be honest, I’ve been a little nervous. There is a huge drive to get Flash on mobile devices when the world seems to be crazy about apps. If you want to build apps with Flash, you can do so with AIR for Android (and eventually other platforms). But I don’t want apps. I want the web. Up to now, a lot of the interest/debate has focused on consuming basic content in Flash. People want Flash on their devices so they can watch video and play games. But we were making huge progress on in-browser RIAs with Flash. I want that momentum back in mobile form.

But what if we can revolutionize the in-browser mobile application experience the way Flash helped revolutionize RIAs on the PC? There is already an undercurrent of anti-native sentiment in the development community. Take a look at Sencha Touch, which is a fantastic looking mobile application framework designed specifically for i-devices and the mobile browser. And their first marketing campaign is even better, declaring the “end of native” at WWDC.

That’s exactly what the Flash community should be striving for. What’s so great about native? The performance? The user interface? Those are both things we can overcome with better technology and better design. Is it that it’s so easy to make money? Then the web is ripe for a better business model. The biggie is feature access. But here’s where Flash has always led the pack. We’ve had camera/microphone access forever and have always led the way in expanding the functionality the browser could take care of. If we can follow that trajectory on mobile then Flash developers are in a great position to make mobile browser apps a reality.

And that’s what I’m excited about. Screw native. I’m a web developer.