I know I sound like a broken-record with my love for mobile web apps, but I just can’t help it. Last week, the PragProg folks wrote an article about the return of the thick client, thanks to the App Store. I agree with the fact that native apps are winning right now because of the App Store, but disagree that they’re the best way to go, long term.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I’m going mobile web app only for the rest of April. I’m currently moving all my home screen native apps off to page 5 or 6, and replacing them with the equivalent web app version.
The goal is to find out where web apps are lacking — and to find out whether these weaknesses are insurmountable. I’ll update frequently on how hard/easy this is, and I’ll try to be objective as to which native apps perform better than which web apps (and vice versa). It should be an interesting experiment.
This means:
- Tweetie gets replaced with mobile.twitter.com
- Stocks gets replaced with CNNMoney.mobi
- Weather gets replaced with The Weather Channel
- Beejive gets replaced with Google Talk
- Calendar gets replaced with Google Calendar
- Mail gets replaced with Gmail
- Facebook gets replaced with touch.facebook.com
- Maps gets replaced with Google Maps
- Phone and Messages get replaced with Google Voice
This is a shockingly high percentage of my most used apps that are getting replaced. The ones I can tell I’m missing already are: RunKeeper, Messages, Camera, Photos, Foursquare, Boxee, Mint.com, and Tumblr. I’ll just have to continue to use those. (Aside: I’m absolutely stunned by how much I rely on Google: Reader, Talk, Calender, Gmail, Maps, Voice, Search. That freaks me out. A lot.) Of course, I’m also missing many of my casual games like Canabalt and GT Racing. Those I concede will be native for quite some time, but I don’t use them all that often anyways.
For good measure, here’s my new home screen:
