Apps provide a thick-client experience (richer UI, off-line storage etc) and people when they want to do a specific task know what to use. It seems obvious why until the web can be all things to all people we will always have apps. 10B to be precise! Clearly a lot of people like them.
Until native UI features are available using a web based driver there will likely always be some advantage to a slightly thick-client. Exposing UI features is a battle, look at the past for details of hard this is, ActiveX for example. In theory this would have made all Windows UI components available to the web browser, until someone figured out that a security model would be necessary that handicapped things so much it led to Flash. Now we are a decade and a half further on and technologies like jquerymobile will likely see many web solutions be more app like.
Once Apple figure out a better way to save a web 'page' to the home-screen that's intuitive and provides for local storage we will see apps.
Until native UI features are available using a web based driver there will likely always be some advantage to a slightly thick-client. Exposing UI features is a battle, look at the past for details of hard this is, ActiveX for example. In theory this would have made all Windows UI components available to the web browser, until someone figured out that a security model would be necessary that handicapped things so much it led to Flash. Now we are a decade and a half further on and technologies like jquerymobile will likely see many web solutions be more app like.
Once Apple figure out a better way to save a web 'page' to the home-screen that's intuitive and provides for local storage we will see apps.