Considering Apple has the best Web app platform, and has had the best Web app platform for 4 years with nobody even seeming to try to challenge them, I think they have earned the benefit of the doubt that this is part of the transition to Nitro and/or a bug. But there is a double standard with regards to Apple. Any conspiracy theory will do to show they are just like Microsoft. But Microsoft, for example, has no W3C support on its mobiles, and only today rolled out W3C support on the 2 least popular of its 3 PC systems, only 8 years after Apple.

The Register is also not a good single source of any Apple-related story. They are an IT rag who are stuck in the Jurassic era of MSCE IT and who have a known bias against Apple. They are also in the UK, which sadly thinks Silicon Valley is located in Redmond, Washington.

iOS supports 2 kinds of locally-installed apps:

• App Store: native, managed, CocoaTouch apps installed from Apple App Store (since mid-2008)
• W3C: open standard cross-platform W3C HTML5 Web apps installed from any server in the world (since mid-2007)

Both kinds of apps show icons side-by-side on the home screen, both run without a network connection (although a Web app can choose not to support this feature) and both are 100% supported. Contrary to the implications of this BS article and the BS article it is based on, the HTML5 application environment on iOS is the best in the industry. In spite of the fact that Apple gives away it’s WebKit HTML5 engine, other device makers just don’t bother to create a workable Web app platform with it. No, not even devices using Google Android.

Some app developers choose to make App Store apps, some choose to make W3C apps, some choose to make both. For example, both Flickr and Facebook have both. Some users choose one or the other or a mix of both. This choice is a key feature of iOS that developers and users demanded in 2007 when iOS only supported W3C apps.

W3C apps are not really “just Web pages.” The HTML5 spec was originally called “Web Applications 1.0″. It’s more accurate to say Web apps are what replaced Web pages as we changed from HTML4 to HTML5. A key difference is Web pages run their logic primarily on a server, while Web apps run their logic primarily on a client, enabling them to continue to work even without a server connection. This also enables the user interface to be more responsive, and for a server to support many more clients simultaneously without being overloaded. Any website can be added to your iOS device as a Web app, but only some will support offline operation right now.

Go to Facebook on an iOS device, tap the share button in Safari and choose “Add to Home Screen” to install the HTML5 Facebook. Or do the same at Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube and many other Google apps. There are also some “app stores” with only HTML5 apps.

the more you look at this, the more you realize that it’s much to do about nothing..

What remains unknown is whether that is by design or because of a bug.

any link to any web page in the Safari web browser can be added as a icon on the home screen (aka desktop aka app tray) of the phone making it feel more like an app.. still opens in a browser though.. some just open full screen making the also feel more like apps… it seems when the open full screen there is a problem.. and you can also use open webpages within native apps..