Your boss wasn't far off base. A web application is not a replacement for a native application, even if you bundle it up in a UIWebView and sell it through the app store.
My organization works in a variety of languages/runtimes, from ObjC to C to assembly to the JVM. We do web, mobile, server, and OS development -- whatever is needed.
I was in a meeting recently discussing complex image processing we had implemented in C++ using OpenCV. We considered OpenCV and C++ to be the best tools for the specific job at hand, which is why we chose them over the alternatives.
A life-long Flash developer -- who has a heavy investment in Flash remaining relevant in his organization -- chimed in to tell us that Flash can do the same thing, and there was no reason to use C++. In theory, we could have made Flash do our bidding, but it was the wrong tool for the job, and we quite intentionally didn't use it.
Web developers seem to apply the same logic as this Flash developer to the development of native apps. There's a much shorter description for this:
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
My organization works in a variety of languages/runtimes, from ObjC to C to assembly to the JVM. We do web, mobile, server, and OS development -- whatever is needed.
I was in a meeting recently discussing complex image processing we had implemented in C++ using OpenCV. We considered OpenCV and C++ to be the best tools for the specific job at hand, which is why we chose them over the alternatives.
A life-long Flash developer -- who has a heavy investment in Flash remaining relevant in his organization -- chimed in to tell us that Flash can do the same thing, and there was no reason to use C++. In theory, we could have made Flash do our bidding, but it was the wrong tool for the job, and we quite intentionally didn't use it.
Web developers seem to apply the same logic as this Flash developer to the development of native apps. There's a much shorter description for this:
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.