HTML5 and all the surrounding technology is very exciting IMHO. They have the best tools and are quicker to adapt new techniques because of they get to work with a net (the fact that they can rollback quickly if needed). I get a little jealous when I see how quickly they can get something up and running that would take me a few days.
I've worked with both and I can say this is just a case of "the grass is greener".
Nothing "exciting" about HTML5 and the Web for people well versed in a mobile framework. The most interesting things are re-inventions of the wheel, only more hacky and less performant.
Plus, since you can use web views in your native mobile app, there's literary nothing (technologically-wise) you can achieve with HTML5 that you cannot achieve with a native framework. The inverse is not true. Anything that requires extensive collaboration with the underlying machine, low latency, ad-hoc connections to interfaces etc is not possible (you cannot write Garageband with HTML for example. And Flipboard or even Clear would have been noticeably slower).
(Except the distribution method of course -- but then again, nowadays people still debate if it's all about native or it's all about the web, so that's like 50-50.)
Yea I tend to agree on a lot of those points. I'm currently working on a native application that does heavy AV compositing and there is no way that HTML5 solution would be as capable.
Mainly the pain points are on the API and the legacy nature of it, and the surrounding crappy tools. I see cool IDEs, testing frameworks, scaffolding/bootstrapping sets and I can only be a little jealous. Sure we have our share, but it's a small slice of where the majority of effort is in the web world.
My hope, crossing fingers, is that one day HTML apps will truly be able to compete across all facets and access native functionality with the same performance as native platforms. Will this ever be the case? I can only hope.
I think the open source toolchain for Cocoa is pretty great. There are hundreds of incredibly useful projects on Github, like RESTKit or CocoaPods or AFNetworking, libraries to ease the pain of Core Data fetches, etc.
ObjC does have a legacy nature, but I think the community is doing a great job of making life easier.
