John Gruber has a great writeup about Chris Dixon’s comments that the mobile web is dying in favor of apps, and I agree with his overall conclusion: it’s no big deal.

Chris correctly points out that Apple has rejected whole classes of applications. That doesn’t stop the apps from being created, and it doesn’t stop users from accessing anything. It just means there’s another factor worth considering when it comes to architecting the code. And it’s worth keeping in mind that factor fits very nicely into how software is going to be architected over the next decade.

I’ve written about split stack development before, and the trend that Chris points out fits nicely into this model of development. You can read up for a more full description of the idea, but the gist is that we need to take the ideas about separating functional code and presentation to the next logical step. The development community has done that within applications by following the MVC pattern, which is now the basis for nearly all new application development.

If you’ve got multiple non-web apps, as well as a web interface, you should be designing your architecture as an API backend, and then implement each UI on top of that single API. It’s the same good idea as MVC, and it’s both easier and more necessary now than ever.