The ongoing saga of Apple denying Google permission to run Google Voice as a native app on the iPhone has come to an end. No, Apple didn’t cave to the pressure. Google did an end run around the impenetrable Apple iPhone application approval process. Google created a mobile web application version of Google Voice that runs in the existing mobile browser, rather than as a discrete local application on the handset.
This raises a larger question. Why would you create any non-system-level app as anything other than a mobile web application running in the browser? App mania may end up being a 2009 phenomenon. In 2010 look for the rise of HTML5 and more and more mobile browser optimized web applications.
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