ReadWriteWeb

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing from feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then have grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to now the precipice of HTML5. Facebook's creed, or really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once and run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got to the point it is at now and how it is going to iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

We have been waiting most of the year to hear news from Facebook about an HTML5-based Web app store that would circumvent the native application ecosystems of the Android Market and the Apple App Store. Yet, according to Facebook's CTO, there is not going to be a central repository of HTML5 Web apps coming to the platform any time soon.

In the meantime, a Brazilian company called Movile has launched a new version of its Web app store, Zeewe 2.0, which incorporates some key HTML5 features and could provide a roadmap for U.S. developers, like Facebook, in creation of a Web app store.

In the ongoing debate over Web vs. native mobile and tablet apps, it would appear the Web just racked up a few major points.

When Apple changed their subscription rules to require that publishers fork over 30% of the revenue generated from apps sold in the iTunes store, many media companies played along, hoping that making their content available on iOS devices would help them survive the transition from print to pixels.

Google just shipped a new stable release of the Chrome browser that includes two new technologies: Native Client, which allows execution of C and C++ code within the browser, and the Web Audio API, which brings advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript. These features were released in the beta channel in August.

The update also contains some long-awaited improvements for users of Mac OS X Lion, which did not get along well with Chrome previously. In addition to fixing "many crash bugs" and adding "some all-around visual polish," this release adds Lion's new scrollbars and support for its full-screen mode.

Web applications are still one of the greatest threat to enterprise security, according to Hewlett-Packard's 2011 mid-year enterprise security risk report. This is no surprise, considering we saw data from Imperva in July that shows Web apps are probed or attacked at least once every two minutes. What is surprising is that enterprises have been slow to recognize and patch vulnerabilities, giving malicious hackers ample opportunity to penetrate their networks.

Weaknesses in Web applications make up 31% of all vulnerabilities, according to HP. Technically, reports of Web app vulnerabilities have gone down in recent years, but that is not necessarily a good thing. Legacy Web apps still provide a great risk to enterprise security.

Mobile development company appMobi wants to push HTML5. It does not want to do this just as a developer framework or an alternative for publishers who are pondering native apps vs. Web apps. AppMobi wants to push HTML5 as its own mobile platform, capable of taking on Android and iOS from an application level.

Last week, the company added a new tool to its HTML5 developer tool kit to further boost HTML5 development. The appMobi Chrome App Packager enables developers to build Web apps and browser extensions and wrap them for submission to the Chrome Web Store.

Within the next year or so, a flood of HTML5-based Web apps will be coming to mobile devices. It will likely start with games and dedicated applications like e-readers and move to more general use apps like news sites. Companies like Facebook and Amazon will be at the tip of the spear. The next wave will be sophisticated developers that see the power of HTML5 as an alternative to the native application model.

It is not a foregone conclusion, but the rise of Web app stores is a likely future. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" may be driving the shift but other outlets such as news companies may be looking for a way to skirt the strict rules of the Apple App Store or the chaos of the Android Market and create their own centralized hubs for magazine-like Web apps as digital newsstands. Looking ahead, will Web app stores become the dominant model? That is the question for this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

There are some undercurrents swiftly moving through developments circles that will soon become the topic everybody will be discussing. Among those topics, one significantly stands out in the mobile realm - the coming wave of HTML5 Web-based apps. The vanguard is being led by mobile games developers but the rest of ecosystem is not far behind. Facebook's so-called "Project Spartan" is the carrot that has spurred app developers but the ability to disrupt the application store model is high on developers' minds.

In talks with developers last week, the common refrain was "I do not have anything to say about Project Spartan." But app developers know that Project Spartan is coming - they are working with Facebook and soon the Web will see the benefits of their labors. The responses were not "I do not know if it is true or not, I have no idea." Rather they were "I cannot talk about that." The social games developers are leading the way of a trend that could be extremely disruptive to the native app economy.

Mozilla has released a new update of its Firefox browser for Android that brings user interface improvements for consumers and new developer tools to create rich mobile Web applications. Google, Apple, Research In Motion and others should take heed of what Mozilla is doing because it is the evolution of the mobile browser and is a signal of what is to come for smartphone consumers and developers.

The new Firefox for Android app is faster and sleeker than its previous version. In a few words, it actually works. That was not always the case with previous Firefox for Android builds that were difficult to navigate. It is designed to look and feel like an Android application and has a new home screen page, buttons and easy to use features like Firefox sync, add-ons, tabbed browsing and bookmarks. In preliminary testing, the app is more responsive, pinches and zooms faster and generally looks cleaner. Outside of optimization, Mozilla is pointing the way that mobile browsers could and should go in the near future.

HTML5 is changing the way that developers create applications for the mobile Web. Yet, it is not the be all, end all of mobile development. If it was, then the whole discussion of "do I create a native app or a Web app for my service?" would be finished - the Web app would win the day. The developers at pinch/zoom, a company that creates mobile apps for some of the biggest brands on the planet, have been studying how to implement HTML5, and they ask an interesting question: "HTML5 can get the job, but can it do the job?"

The short answer is yes. But it is not as easy as many developers would like. Brian Fling, pinch/zoom developer and author of a best selling book on mobile app development, attempts to answer that question. In a post on pinch/zoom's blog Swipe, Fling discusses the "Anatomy of a HTML5 Mobile App" and what developers will need to get started, what the pitfalls are and why HTML5 is so difficult.