You make some excellent and valid points, to which I don't necessarily disagree. I just think the inertia is towards the use of native apps over web browsers as delivery mechanisms for software - both mobile and PC.
A couple of points:
"Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs."
I see the major web browser as those competing platforms. The effort to make something work on different web browsers is huge, almost, or equal to, the difficultly of choosing a cross platform development tool and targeting multiple OSes.
"...the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook".
A native facebook application might be pretty cool. Really, do I do something much different when I use Thunderbird and eschew Gmail?
A couple of points:
"Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs."
I see the major web browser as those competing platforms. The effort to make something work on different web browsers is huge, almost, or equal to, the difficultly of choosing a cross platform development tool and targeting multiple OSes.
"...the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook".
A native facebook application might be pretty cool. Really, do I do something much different when I use Thunderbird and eschew Gmail?