Mobile Apps, RIP?

Michael Mace writes an obituary for native apps for mobile devices - too much platform fragmentation, too many restrictive business practices

"But we never figured out how to help developers make money"

He does not mention that even in PC/Mac world we have been moving away from "on-premise" and more into the cloud via SaaS via tools like Zoho.

As we find in SaaS world though, some applications though will continue to stay (or at least be available as a backup) offline. On the mobile device with ever new features we will have applications like Word Card Mobile which uses the camera on my AT&T Tilt then OCRs the details into Contacts. There will be geocaching tools you need for the last mile of GPS tracking. I appreciate having a PDF reader and the Microsoft Office tools on my device to at least read documents.

But overall, he is correct - more applications will be written for the cloud. Let's just pray our telecoms can deliver the mobile bandwidth and uptime.