Good god, let's hope this dystopian future you speak of doesn't actually come to pass. Can you imagine having to launch a separate native app for Hacker News, Facebook, Github, Amazon, Ebay, etc, all of which go far beyond "document sharing and simple data collection/retrieval"? I think you are grossly overestimating the usability of having so many desktop applications and glossing over the pain in the ass it is to develop multiple versions of said applications just to be cross-platform.
> Can you imagine having to launch a separate native app for Hacker News, Facebook, Github, Amazon, Ebay, etc
Best I'm aware, a lot of these apps exist already. The step we've yet to reach is "having to launch" instead of merely being able to launch. We probably will for some of them, though.
Speaking for myself, the dystopian present and near-future has me a lot more worried than a hypothetical future with apps: I've lost count of the number of websites which used to work fine on a 1st gen iPad and which now either refuse to work on grounds its browser is too old (e.g. Github), or outright frequently crash its browser owing to out of memory errors due to excessive use of javascript (e.g. most news site).
> Best I'm aware, a lot of these apps exist already.
Very few people use them, however.
> I've lost count of the number of websites which used to work fine on a 1st gen iPad and which now either refuse to work on grounds its browser is too old (e.g. Github), or outright frequently crash its browser owing to out of memory errors due to excessive use of javascript (e.g. most news site).
The situation isn't that great for native apps either. Most times, you're lucky if an app has targeted more than just one platform. And try running modern native apps on the 1st gen iPad; developers leave old tech in the dust regardless of which platform their targeting.
I will agree that web apps need to get better in general and work within the constraints of the browser, and that news sites should have as little complicated javascript as possible (or at least sensible fallbacks), but that's not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For a wide swath of applications, the web is the only truly ubiquitous deployment target and when done right (Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Hacker News, etc) web apps can reach a much larger user base for same development time than native apps can.
