[nupark2]

While improving the web application experience is commendable, there is still simply no replacement for the native components. Broadly speaking, investment in mobile webapps largely seems to be about improving the entrenched web developer's experience, rather than the actual user's experience.

Insofar as Apple continues to invest in UI R&D, a clone of their UI's look and feel will always lack fidelity to the original, sit in the uncanny valley when approached by users, and require ongoing maintenance to track upstream changes as best as possible.

Additionally, fluid scrolling on iOS devices is resource intensive and requires a very careful attention to performance details; I've yet to see HTML5 UIs scroll as smoothly as a tuned native UI.

[lukifer]

Apple actually fell down on this one; it should be possible to create natively scrolling divs without resorting to JS trickery. (In fairness, Android only acquired this feature very recently.)

> Broadly speaking, investment in mobile webapps largely seems to be about improving the entrenched web developer's experience, rather than the actual user's experience.

While there is some truth to this, it doesn't tell the whole story. Most developers don't have the time or desire to maintain multiple native codebases, and so using web tools improves user experience by allowing the app to exist on their platform at all. Also, sometimes these things come in handy on actual websites (personally, I consider "Click here to download our mobile app!" terrible UX).

[JoelSutherland]

Mobile processing power is doubling annually, GPU speed at an even faster rate. Hardware acceleration for CSS transforms is only starting to get good. (No negative values on cubic-bezier timing functions!)

No, web components haven't met native ones yet, but they only need to achieve 60 fps. They will get there, it's a safe bet.

[lurker19]

By the time HTML is as good as native is, native will have moved on to something else, like holograms. Look what happened on the desktop: after 10 years webtech finally became usable as a UI, just in time for everyone to jump to mobile and set performance back another 10 years.

[btrask]

Given Apple's App Store restrictions, the choice is often between cloned UI in web apps or no iOS support at all.

[jpeterson]

Wow, I can't believe this is the top comment on HN. It's the kind of shortsighted sentiment that you look back on two years later and have a good chuckle.