> Here are a list of things you still can’t do with mobile safari due to Apple’s refusal to support them:
>
> Create an app loading screen
> Use push notifications
> Add offline support
> Create an initial app UI to load instantly
> Prompt installation to the home screen through browser-guided dialog
Why do I want these things, as a user. App loading screens?
I love the web. I love hyperlinks, text and images. The web of connections that lead you to information. Everything in that list is detrimental to a good experience on the web.
I don't want push notifications, I barely enable them for native apps. And it bugs the hell out of me when every second website in desktop Safari prompts to send me push notifications. No. Why would I want this on mobile?
Same thing with the home screen. I love the fact that the address bar in my web browser is my history, my reminders, my bookmarks, my open tabs. I start typing what I want and I'm there. Finding native apps on my home screen is only just getting to the same place with Spotlight, why would I want to make the web worse by sticking icons for pages on my home screen?
And browser-guided dialogs to put more icons on my home screen? Seriously?
This author's post is a great argument against web apps on mobile.
If native web apps are to be more of a universal thing, I believe there ought to be a blank-canvas "meta-browser" layer that sits above the browser and that all web apps (including today's browsers) are built on top of. Basically a lightweight, sandboxed pseudo-OS that offers a robust standard library, a URL scheme and easy networking support, some sort of bytecode, maybe a UI toolkit, etc. Web apps would still take up the same amount of space and would still be able to run without installing, but they would now be endowed with native performance, app-specific features, and a consistent, functional UI. (Quiz: how often do your back/forward buttons fail when using, for example, your bank's website? The fact that these two ubiquitous controls simply break the web more often than not should be telling.)
Shoehorning all that stuff into a hyperlinked, navigable document browser is insanity, and you can always feel it unless your web-app has basically reimplemented the DOM from scratch[1]. The web is currently layered upside-down and I think web apps won't lose their reputation until this is fixed.