Whatever tomorrow brings in terms of Apple and iPhones, the underlying trend of 2011 has been the commodisation of mobile hardware as the bite of software platforms rises from OEMs' ankles into the guts of the entire mobile industry.

And no young critter has sharper teeth in the gaming space than HTML5.

Apple as Janus

So, how do smart OEMs deal with the situation?

By making sure their hardware is blazingly fast when it comes to running such software, of course.

That's the take-home from game development tools outfit YoYo Games at least.

It's just released the first commercially available build of its GameMaker for HTML5 engine, and while developing the code, it came up with some interesting findings.

"The performance of JavaScript under iOS 5 is at least 10 times better than iOS 4, that's what we see from the development builds," says YoYo Games' CEO Sandy Duncan.

Of course, the tech was developed on current hardware, suggesting that near future Apple smartphones and tablets will provide a circa 20-fold increase.

"It suggests to me that Apple isn't particularly bothered if you run games in the browser or natively," Duncan adds. 

Two states, we want two states

It's a bold statement given Apple owns the paid app ecosystem, as well as the majority of the freemium app market.

Yet, given Steve Jobs' attitude to Flash, and hence Apple's inherent support for HTML5, there's an ambitious inevitability that Apple believes it can dominate both the native and browser-based app ecosystem with a combination of its App Store and the performance its hardware provides for HTML5.

Duncan underlines such arguments.

"I get the feeling Apple sees a two tier experience as okay and that the superiority of the App Store experience from a consumers' point of view will prevent any marked decline [because of HTML5]," he says. 

"This is definitely good news for anyone who wants to host, distribute or play browser games on iOS devices as I don't see Apple putting any major obstacles in their way."