Chris Messina has posted an interesting argument that the rise of popularity in applications on mobile phones has stunted the growth of the true 'next big thing', the web based applet that runs in the browser. It's worth a read over a cup of coffee, including his (perhaps not quite) tongue in cheek thinking that Steve Jobs is deliberately crippling the app store. Of course in all this heat, I'm sure many US commentators will forget about one of the leading on device web app platforms... Nokia's Web Runtime.

Steve Jobs hates the App Store for the same reasons I do: development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet. We’ll look at this period as a great Dark Age that preceded the real next leap in computing — the age when we moved away from the stale metaphor of applications and moved to a world of ad-hoc connected identity agents living and feeding on a mesh of interwoven open data.

More at Factory Joe's.