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Today’s article on Mashable proves a prediction I made months ago about the superiority of native mobile phone applications over mobile web-based ones.

Mashable contends that the iPhone App Store means the eventual death of online web applications for iPhone. When it first launched iPhone, Apple had promoted the latter as the best way to develop applications for the device. Indeed, to install applications on iPhone, it had to be “jailbroken”, meaning modifications to the firmware had to be made. Says Mashable,

Apple was ostensibly under the impression that users wouldn’t mind using Safari to access applications and the lack of native software wouldn’t really matter. But after few people jumped on the bandwagon, it became abundantly clear that developers weren’t all that willing to jump on-board and more often than not, online applications were plagued with lag issues, few updates, and only simple games were available.

Of course, the real proof that people hated online applications materialized in the form of a cottage industry that revolved around unlocking the iPhone. And as the number of people who wanted to be able to add native applications to their iPhone grew exponentially throughout the year, Apple was forced to make a move (to launching the App Store).

Back in April, I had said,

That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally… the reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”).

The App Store is a wonderful thing to happen for the mobile application industry in general. As Robert Scoble says, “The new things (apps) available for the iPhone are just years ahead of other phones.” Developers of mobile applications for other phones (Nokia S60, Samsung smartphones) will inevitably copy the functionality, usability and revenue models of these applications for iPhone. Perhaps other handset manufacturers will also get into the business of hosting and selling high-quality mobile applications. I think Nokia has already begun to do this, but  the experience is rather fragmented.