My original posting on this topic got deleted when my hosting company moved my blog to another server, so I’m repeating it here, a little differently (I can’t recall exactly what I wrote).

The iPhone doesn’t support access to device APIs and I was surprised to find Ajit’s Open Gardens blog making light of this problem, which is essentially walled garden at the device level. Instead, we are led to believe by Jobs that browser-plus-Ajax is enough. Obviously, this is nonsense and shouldn’t cloud critical thinking. What I have seen is hundreds of mobile apps deployed on many networks. The story is always the same. For the best experience, it is usually either a Symbian app or a J2ME app on a device with rich device APIs. For a good user experience, an app launcher on the device home page is usually important too. Devices APIs are important and becoming more so, not less. Therefore, the idea that all this is going to be trumped by browser-minus-device-APIs is incredulous.

A web-standards based solution has many attractions, but even the Opera Platform - “Mobile Web 2.0″ incarnate - works with device APIs. Here’s their own words:

“The possible functionality of the JavaScript extensions is only limited by the API for the device platform itself.”

I have yet to see the DOM for iPhone, so perhaps they do after all support device APIs. However, reading some blogs and Apple’s own docs on the subject, it’s looking rather boring for the DOM.

As I said in the deleted post, there’s a lot more to deployment of mass-market mobile apps than “Oh my God, we forgot Ajax!”