How long will web apps be The way?

Many people are hoping that web apps will not be the only method of third-party software development for iPhone. As a future iPhone user (hopefully) I'm partially in that camp myself.

Here's what I think - "real" iPhone apps are coming... but not any time soon. Certainly not in October - next year, maybe. This is just a wild guess, but my reasoning is basically this: Steve wouldn't have gone on stage at WWDC 2007 and made an announcement out of it if he didn't really expect a respectable number of developers to hammer out iPhone web apps.

Of course, he had to say something about iphone software at a developers' conference; perhaps he just had nothing better to say. But now that he's annoyed a good number of Mac coders by telling them to flex their web muscle, it would be adding insult to injury if he stepped out in October and went, "hey, thanks for all these web apps you've built - now guess what, here's an SDK for real iPhone apps that will make your toy websites look totally Fischer-Price." It would please desktop Mac developers, though, and maybe the groaning of those who had invested time and effort into building web apps would get lost in the giddiness.

The way I see it, Apple will want both types of apps to shine on iPhone. One of the loudest groans about the WWDC spin was that Apple is being insincere - if web apps on iPhone are such a great idea, why aren't they developing them? I think they are. They might offer a simple widget or two at first, but the best project for Apple to web-ify is .Mac. It's a promising system, but it hasn't been updated in a very long time... except its webmail program, which is now all Web 2.0-hip (typical "toe in the water" move by Apple). And if this meant running .Mac services on Windows - well, we've all seen how Apple feels about handing out ice water to people in hell.

If it makes sense for anyone to assist Apple in this, from both the technical and the business angle, it's Google. If there's a set of web apps we need on iPhone, it's Google Docs & Spreadsheets. If there's a technology that might help us deal with the gotta-be-online nature of web apps, it's Google Gears.

So here's my got-nothing-to-lose prediction: web apps from Apple and Google coming soon to an iPhone near you. If I had to guess what the more long-term strategy was, it's some sort of "I can't tell if it's the web or the desktop" level of functionality. But that's been promised many times, and who knows how soon it can be delivered even by the combined minds of Apple and Google.

P.S. There's still the question of why Apple showed such an underwhelming web app - the dull little directory search - at WWDC. Perhaps they didn't want to overpromise or blow their cover?