Well, some would say, "just build the thing web-based", of course, this has some advantages (at first sight at least) you code it in javascript with HTML 5 and it theoretically will run on most of the devices since most of them have webkit-based web engines! This approach has proven on the past to work really well for desktop environments, so let's listen to the story of an embedded-web app development.
The story of a mobile web development.
Say we start building the app with this approach. For now everything is working fine, we spent 3 or 4 days just coding plain html and javascript with one framework like Sencha touch or jQuery Mobile and it runs fine on the device (say iphone) emulator, then we spent 4 to 6 days coding a data layer using local storage or web SQL and finally a couple more of days testing on a real device.
Well, let's try it on the Android emulator.... "DANG! those animations were supposed to work!, and also why the layout is so off? And this looks like an iOS app, my android users won't dig that!
After going through the first experience you realize, you need a theme engine!! and switch the theme for each device... also it would be nice to add some code to adapt the components layout for each screen size and done! after 4 more days of writing javascript your app works fine on the iphone and android, now what? My friend has a blackberry!! Well, a couple more days to build the blackberry theme...
And the story could go on and on while testing on tablets of different brands and screen sizes, but finally... why the app is so slow?? it leaves me without enough battery to make phone calls!
Well finally we wrote just one application that works (awful) on every device, and also we as developers had to deal with thinks like there's no javascript debugger on the device emulators.
The story of a native mobile app development.
After going through the mobile experience we decided to give native application development a try, so started eclipse with the Android plugin and created the user interface with the visual designer, after a couple of hours we have the same 10 screens our web app used to have, with android user experience, ok, we found we have frameworks for data storage so after two days of work we have the same app running.
Ok, now let's bring the iPhone version! We create an Xcode project, after a couple of hours we have the iPhone and iPad user interface, then by taking advantage of the data APIs build the business logic and done!, the app is ready to test on the new platform.
Same story goes for blackberry, and other mobile platforms, now we take a look at the apps, they're working fine but oh no!! we have the same codebase all over the place, in different programming languages and development environments! That's not good for sure.
Time for comparison.
After telling the two stories we had a not-so-happy ending for each. So we need to choose now!! What should we do for our mobile apps.
Well It depends of a few things: manly development costs, delivery time constraints and importance of the user experience, so let's take a look of each point for both platforms.
Development Costs.
On the one hand for a web development you need a web developer with basic knowledge of each platform on the native side, this is because even though embedded web applications are mostly wrote on javascript, you need to build and embedded app environment (or use something like PhoneGap which entails the same basic knowledge), also you need the native development environment to build and package the embedded app environment for each platform.
On the other hand you need an application developer who has medium to advanced skills on building native mobile applications and also the same native development environments.
Adding features to the application is relatively simple for embedded web applications while adding features to native applications would take to over and over add the same thing for each platform codebase. We can think here that since the user experiences and the capabilities of mobile devices are different, adding a feature would also be an easy thing for native but complex for web.
Another important thing is tooling, web applications have somehow basic tooling while native applications have very powerful tooling and also the ability to debug and profile the code.
So in my opinion, at the end od the day, the cost is greater for embedded web apps than native web apps even considering that the codebase is repeated.
Delivery Timing.
As the year 2012, people has a lot of experience writing web applications, we have a lot of frameworks and tools to write these things, but most of this is by taking advantage of powerful servers and helping the developers on not writing HTML and CSS, because writing HTML and CSS is a slow process! They're not meant for creating user interfaces but for creating documents, so we made a lot of things to manage achieving the look and feel of user interfaces. Even though frameworks like Sencha Touch or jQuery mobile makes creating the user interfaces rather simple, you still have the three to four days time to create a 10 screens app, and then lots of time and hacks to make it look native for each platform.
With the availability of developer tooling, native applications can be built very quickly, the pitfall is having to deal with lots of programming languages, a not-so-skilled developer could find writing code on different programming languages a hard task, but let's face it, data-driven mobile apps actually entails caching data locally and sending it to (or reading from) a server, with some documentation and examples the logic should be done in a couple of days.
So speaking of time, for web apps, you could have say three developers working on the same codebase, but truth is, the more developers are working on the same codebase the more they get into each others way.
If you have three targeted platforms and three developers you can start the development for each platform at the same time and see it code-complete in 4 to 6 days.
So in my opinion, at the end of the day, you can make delivery rather quicker if you pick native development since the tooling is better and you can have people working independently, with proper project management all the platforms will be finished mostly at the same time.
User Experience.
Finally, the user experience, every platform has its own user experience, meaning for touch gestures, ways of navigating through screens and so on, for example android apps have a back button and a home button which removes the need for applications to provide a "software" navigation button, iOS phones doesn't have this button but all the applications have the same set of ways for navigating.
Also widget layout, colors, sizes and icon meanings are different, also you may have to provide localization and so on. This on an embedded web app will take lots of lines of javascript, and the more lines of javascript you write, the more battery you consume which is also a really bad thing for user experience.
Finally, HTML user interfaces need to be parsed, and rendered by a relatively slow processor so the user would notice some degree of unresponsiveness while interacting with the application.
Native apps doesn't have this advantages, they are built for each platform and for that, you just build the user experience the platform has and later you don't need to adapt it for another platform (maybe only phone/tablet adjustments), so they run fast, very responsive and with low battery consumption.
Conclusion
At this point I hope you're more than convinced that creating embedded web apps for different mobile devices has only the advantage of one single codebase, which is also a drawback because on different platforms things are different. Taking the approach of creating unified user experiences will result on confusing the user and making him to learn new things while he only wants to get the task done; this only works for a little set of apps that has really well-known user interface interactions (like facebook).
In my opinion, building native apps is way better than building embedded web apps, specially thinking on the user experience.
It would be really nice to have a serious scientific study for this, but at least for me, I'm a lot more skilled for web development than native development and with all that, it takes me a lot less time to build the same app native than web based.
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