Washington Mutual (WaMu) has rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of their web site. It pretty much lets you do all of the basic account management stuff the full version of the site allows, except you can’t view canceled checks. This is a great example of why web apps for the iPhone aren’t going away as some have contended.
iPhone web apps have a number of advantages over native apps, including but not limited to:
- Rapid development using existing web development skills/bodies.
- Use of existing web application infrastructure (i.e., no additional costs).
- Avoidance of the time consuming and magic-8 ball logic of the App Store vetting process.
- Seemless application updating.
- Things like phonegap will eventually help bridge the divide between web apps and native apps by taking advantage of the iPhone’s hardware features.
I currently have home screen icons for 5 different iPhone-optimized Web Apps (Digg.com, ESPN, WaMu, Flickr, and Dropbox), plus a few other mobile web sites that are in need of an iPhone-optimized version, including the DirecTV Scheduler and cnn.com.