. . . Apple had initially announced that the SDK for the iPhone would be Safari. In other words, iPhone applications would be web apps. As a proponent of using web technologies for application development, I rejoiced. The approach is also sensible in that it solves many of the tricky issues associated with running native apps on a consumer device. Years of practical experience with sandboxed web apps have made them extremely safe, if not perfectly so. And the barriers to entry for developers are lower because so many people are familiar with web development. It didn't take long, however, for Apple to bow to pressure to release a native SDK, and they have done so with much fanfare. Considering Steve Jobs's history for obfuscating his strategic plans, it's quite possible that the whole "Safari as SDK" idea was just a smokescreen.

Smokescreen or not, Apple's iTunes App Store has captured a lot of imagination - - not to mention clicks and purchases. While there have been many complaints about the iPhone 2.0 rollout, and even the performance of the updated platform, so far there have been no major kvetches about the app store. And, while it's still early in the game, no game-breaking security meltdowns have resulted from all the new software going onto several million devices all at once.

Gertner suggests that tools for native application development, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio, continue to outpace tools for development of web-based applications. "As computing's center of gravity shifts away from general-purpose desktop machines to mobile devices, set-top boxes, game consoles and the like, are native apps poised to stage a comeback?," he asks.

One way to find an answer to that question is to keep eyes focused on Apple's next earnings announcement, a few months down the road.