For regular iPhone and iPod Touch Apps you purchase and download them from the iTunes App Store. You access the App Store from your iPhone or from iTunes on your computer and select and download the app you want. So what’s different about a web app?

You access a web app, also knows as a web application, by visiting a website on your iPhone. It will seem just like a regular app most of the time, but each time you use the app you’re actually visiting the web page. This means that if you have no web access (via wifi, 3G, etc.) you can’t use the app at all. When I turned off wifi on my iPod Touch and tried to access a web app it initially came up with the screen I’d last seen, then I got this rather unhelpful error message:

Trying to use a web app without the web doesn't work.

In the next tutorial post, I’ll show you how to add a web app to your main iPhone screen so you don’t have to open Mobile Safari and type in the app’s address to use it. Stay tuned!

- Jeshyr