HTML5 : Sencha's Fastbook

When Zuck said HTML5 is not ready yet, many took it as a word of God and turned away from HTML5 to native SDK for mobile application development. Couple of days back Sencha brought the focus back into HTML5 with their new HTML5 based clone of facebook's official app . "So, when Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn't ready, we took a little offense to the comment." they wrote in their blog The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story 

In my opinion both Zuck and Sencha could be right. As Sencha have actually demonstrated, it probably is quite possible to develop responsive applications using HTML5. At the same time it is also true that it depends a lot on the developers skill set. By HTML5 they actually refer to the JavaScript and when trying to develop rich applications using Java Script you end up creating a lot of low level code. On top of it the tooling for HTML5/Java Script is not as mature as it is for say native SDKs or even Adobe Flex/Flash. This makes HTML5 development time consuming and complicated. 

The main stream programming world would  probably prefer native SDKs whenever they can and they have to provide rich experience to users. HTML5 based applications will be the poor cousins and will be the secondary choice. The user experience of HTML5 based applications will be behind native applications.

At the same time, native applications have their own issues like application discovery,  code updates and they are discussed here and here . I think the future is probably in mobile web where web sites(applications) in mobile devices provide an experience similar to native mobile apps. And for that to happen, HTML5 is must.