Some of these complaints are side effects of Apple's implementation and not apps in general.
Frequent updates are often used to churn an app for visibility on iTunes for better discoverability. Thanks to this, apps are updated for very minor reasons, and most people don't give a crap about minor updates.
apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other
That's not entirely true. Apps are only islands if you make them that way. Many iOS apps talk to each other using URL protocol handlers as an interchange mechanism. I just bought TextExpander Touch, and it works with over 120 other apps. There's some Twitter clients that do something similar. No question that this would be even better with more support for it in the OS, but it works now.
I spent much of last year working on an HTML5 app. Maybe HTML5 will equal the app experience someday. But that day is not today.
Re: updating your app all the time for discoverability, on the flip side of that coin is that if you update your app frequently you'll also lose glowing 1.0 reviews frequently, to be replaced by the often-less-glowing 1.1 reviews. This is actually a large deterrent for many developers to ever release bugfix updates without new features because people are less prone to leave 5-star reviews on a new version that just fixes some small issues they may not have even noticed.
Frequent updates are often used to churn an app for visibility on iTunes for better discoverability. Thanks to this, apps are updated for very minor reasons, and most people don't give a crap about minor updates.
apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other
That's not entirely true. Apps are only islands if you make them that way. Many iOS apps talk to each other using URL protocol handlers as an interchange mechanism. I just bought TextExpander Touch, and it works with over 120 other apps. There's some Twitter clients that do something similar. No question that this would be even better with more support for it in the OS, but it works now.
I spent much of last year working on an HTML5 app. Maybe HTML5 will equal the app experience someday. But that day is not today.