Whither HTML5 in the mobile space?


First Microsoft seemingly rolled Silverlight under the bus in favor of HTML5,  and now Adobe may have done the same with Flash.  This makes a lot of sense given the increasing fragmentation of the web (Apple/Android's Apps are increasingly creating mini walled gardens that have a difficult time interacting with each other).

In this vein, Microsoft seems to have a bit of an edge (at least theoretically).  Their mobile paradigm (focused on HTML5 based apps) allows for apps to communicate with each other - the famous example of course being the one where if you search on Bing (ok, Google, whatever) for a movie title, then the search also gets executed against all of your apps, and their results are also displayed.  

On the Apple front, there has been a lot of Have my cake and eat it too going on, with support for HTML5 in the browsers, but a distinct desire to maintain the App Store model - a bit of a contradiction since an HTML5 'web-app' should work just as well as an HTML5 'mobile-app' (except for the part that Apple gets no money from it).

Schmidt/Google, on the other hand, have already indicated that HTML5 is the future as far as they are concerned, for both mobile and regular usage, and various platform vendors have been jumping on the bandwagon too, such as Sencha and PhoneGap (even though they clearly have quite a ways to go!)

Even more relevantly, platform issues (IOS vs Android) currently ensure that native apps will really be more capable and/or user-friendly for the fore-seeable future, and 'cross platform' apps will only be useful/relevant as long as they don't really exercise any of the underlying platform specific capabilities.  The hardware universe is not just evolving at a rapid clip, but its also pretty massively fragmented - resulting in the 'native capabilities' that are exposed/exposable being quite radically different across not just iOS/Android, but also within Android versions. That said, there are some 'standard' native capabilities that can be accessed (GPS, Accelerometer, etc.) that seem to have become standardized, a trend that will surely continue. 

The bottom line here - HTML5 is starting (barely!) to get some momentum.  A lot is going to depend on how well Microsoft's new philosophy is received, and if they end up backtracking vis-a-vis support for their existing platforms and environments...

Postnotes:  
1) Nokia is a wildcard.  They have commited to Microsoft,  have a massive distribution network, and could significantly impact the adoption of Windows Mobile. 
2) Silverlight may not entirely be abandoned.  There is clearly going to be desktop support for it, but all the rumblings from BUILD and massive inconsistencies in statements from Microsoft seem to imply that its days are numbered...

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