[Silhouette]

If you agree that native apps on the desktop are a good thing, than I think you would agree that, for smartphone users, native mobile apps are a good thing as well, for the same reason.

That doesn't necessarily follow. The average mobile app is so simple in terms of both the data it's working with and the complexity of its UI that reasonably efficient code is unlikely to challenge a modern mobile device, whether it's native or running within a browser.

[saagarjha]

> The average mobile app is so simple in terms of both the data it's working with and the complexity of its UI that reasonably efficient code is unlikely to challenge a modern mobile device, whether it's native or running within a browser.

Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this isn't the case. Somehow, it seems that web apps just never get the performance that native apps do.

[Silhouette]

Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this isn't the case.

Has it? Web apps might be positively correlated with poor performance, but I don't see any causal relationship there for the kind of apps we're talking about here.

From direct personal experience, some of the UIs I've worked on have been relatively complicated by web app standards, yet typically there's been no perceptible lag in any rendering or interactions. We could achieve that kind of responsiveness at least a decade ago, on much less powerful hardware than sits in your pocket today. Obviously there is an inherent delay in any communication required with the server, which is one of the main areas where PWAs and some of the other modern APIs can help to minimise the effect. Other than that, modern JS runtime environments running on just about any smartphone, tablet or laptop from the past few years are plenty fast enough for the kinds of software most of us are trying to run within them.

Of course, that's not to say there aren't many poorly performing web apps out there. It's just that I've yet to see one where the poor performance was demonstrably attributable to the fundamental web technologies involved, as opposed to simpler explanations like developers who had no idea what they were doing and relied on inefficient designs, bloated frameworks, and so on. You get that with native desktop software as well, but no-one's saying a modern PC can't do things quickly just because someone managed to write yet another text editor that had a noticeable delay just opening a file with a few thousand lines in it.