The iPhone as the ultimate proofpoint for rich local mobile apps

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. One of the lesser observed phenomena in the midst of the overall phenomenal success of the iPhone is what it says about “rich local apps” on mobile versus “thin client web apps”.

Consider the following:

• the iPhone still has very small overall mobile phone market share
• it has a fantastic web browser, the best in the industry
• it has very fast 3G data connections

Presumably this would be enough to have developers targeting the iPhone with either dedicated web pages, or conditionally optimized websites. It has been predicted for years that thinclient mobile apps would surpass native applications in capabilities and marketshare, as networks got faster and mobile browsers got better. Surely the iPhone must be the “knee in the curve” when this would finally take off.

Instead developers are rushing to learn a decades old obscure programming language (Objective C in 2008?) to write native applications for the iPhone. And they are submitting their applications to the iPhone app store at a blistering rate. Steve Jobs remarks on it as the most amazing thing he’s seen in his years in the industry (presumably because he too was expecting more mobile web browser apps?). To me, this means, even moreso on other platforms with less optimal browsers, a bright future for native device optimized mobile applications.