Awesome post - really interesting to see the evolution and how it was all started without the help of sites like Kickstarter (seems like that's where they would have started if the GoPro was about to come out today).
Interesting take on the situation. Reminds me of the recent xbox post -- yet another missed opportunity to bring back the character the author speaks of, although, perhaps that's why it was missed in the first place.
Great beginners tips to mobile analytics. App Annie and Intercom.io are definitely leaders in the space and product quality insights. Great job Countly!
This is a great personal effort to bring improvements to a platform we all know and love - I've got many friends overseas who all speak (and most critically - think ) in English to varying degrees.
Having come from a few startups and many more random experiments - most mediocre failures, I'd tend to agree that the web allow for much more initial testing and product validation (depending on the product and industry of course).
Gabor Cselle wrote an excellent post a few months back titled "The Biggest Problem in App Discovery" ( http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/10/the-biggest-problem-in-a... ) that every new startup with a basic MVP app will face (heck even with a fully polished app it's hard).
The point that needs to be really illustrated is that the web is still critical and regardless of the language used, will provide you with a suitable platform to test, iterate and improve before investing time trying to compete for minds, hearts and wallets on mobile.