On Monday, a few of us from Trilibis attended the “HTML5: The next trend for mobile” event hosted by the Silicon Valley’s chapter of Mobile Monday (@momosv). The event kicked off with three of the panelists showing demos of their slick HTML5 apps – a magazine app, a movie recommendation portal and accounting software for small businesses. All three demos were delivered mostly without a glitch – very impressive, considering that the full HTML5 specification is far from fully baked. At the same time, all three demos showed products that utilized HTML5 within a native iOS wrapper, gently understating that HTML5 does not yet accommodate the full range of features these developer needed.

Unlike the revolutionary Financial Times app, which is accessed and rendered by a mobile browser bypassing the App store completely, these demo apps were really not web apps at their core. Instead, they leveraged iOS codebase for various things, such as navigation or UI rendering, and they relied on the App Store for distribution.

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I had the privilege of being a human dart board recently, on a Mobile Monday panel debating Mobile Web vs. Native Applications. There was strong interest in the discussion, with the 400+ seat venue overbooked. Trilibis Mobile’s perspective – that the mobile web is the platform that will dominate moving forward – was probably overly represented on this panel. But it’s pretty hard to argue against the historical trend of more open systems eventually winning out over the more closed ones. See the debate for yourself here.