Building the best mobile user experience: web apps or native apps?

A round-up of mobile web app versus native app discussions. More to come.....send along any links that have been missed.

Why mobile web apps should stop trying to act like native apps

"Pretenders are mobile Web apps that try to replicate the native experience. You’ve no doubt seen Web apps with iPhone-style back buttons, awkward attempts at implementing gestures, laggy scrolling and the like."

HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship

"Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. It’s not even remotely close. In fact, you could argue that the discrepancy isn’t much smaller than it was three years ago."

iOS 5 Brings Native-Style Scrolling to Web Apps

A "new inherited CSS property, -webkit-overflow-scrolling, is available," these notes explain. "The value touch allows the Web developer to opt in to native-style scrolling in an overflow:scroll element."

Facebook’s Focus In 2011: Better Cross-Platform Unification Led By HTML5

“When we update something, there are about 7 different versions we have to update,” Taylor said. He rattled off a few: facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, the iPhone version, the Android version, etc. “It’s an incredible challenge,” he said. “And there’s feature-skew,” he continued. ... He did acknowledge that HTML5 was still a bit quirky when compared to native applications. “But the gap is closing,” Taylor concluded. Google Continues To Embrace Native iPhone Apps As Google Translate Hits App Store "Google Translate has previously been available on the iPhone via an HTML5 experience since mid 2008. But again, now iPhone users are getting a native experience with some significant new additions." Scrollability, New iOS Physics Project from Facebook for iPhone Creator, Joe Hewitt

The goal of Scrollability is to give mobile Web applications "a pretty darn good approximation of native scrolling," the description reads on GitHub.

The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man

"As someone who has tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa."

The myth of the “native” app

"I think the basic point should be emerging. Users really aren’t all that concerned that an app “follows the conventions of a native app”. Like much to do with these debates, such observations are mere assertions, unsupported by any evidence. From the perspective of the user, the “native” app is a myth. If “nativity” were such a compelling user desire, would 90% of the top paid iPhone Apps use little if any CocoaTouch UI elements? ... When building web apps, don’t ape “native” (that is iOS) user experiences. User’s it would seem don’t actually give a damn."