Not many developers are happy with Apple’s solution for developing applications for the iPhone: web applications. Personally, I’m ok with it because I’ve seen what can be done with JavaScript.

Except for a few things:

– Lack of access to the hardware.
– Inability to run applications offline.
– Limited integration with the rest of the user interface.

There’s not much Apple can do to give developers access to the hardware short of providing a “real” environment to develop in, i.e. Cocoa. It would be great to be able to write applications for hardware like GPS receivers, or to write network utilities that require sockets, such as SSH clients.

The ability to run applications offline isn’t as important if we always have access to the EDGE network. It would be nice for on airplanes, etc though.

But to satisfy us until Apple gives us an Objective-C API (you ARE working on that…right Apple?), there’s a few things they could to do fix the third issue.

JavaScript is a very capable programming language, there’s not much you can’t do given the right APIs. The iPhone needs the following things to make these web apps seems more like native iPhone apps:

– Shortcut icons on the home screen. Give us one click access to our apps.
– Native looking UI widgets. At least give developers graphics for the standard buttons, menus, text boxes, lists, etc.
– Full screen. No reason to have a URL bar and browser controls for our own applications.
– More JavaScript events. We have click events… and that’s about it. Give us cool multitouch events like pinch and double tap. Let us redefine them to suit our own applications.

Given these things, iPhone web apps would be acceptable, at least for now.