I do tend to release apps in UIKit, so I don't quite achieve Buzzword Bingo, but I have always been a fan of native apps, and have watched the various efforts to avoid native, with the kind of sick fascination usually reserved for train wrecks.
Do you rewrite your apps for other platforms? I don't think anyone avoids native, it's just that cross platform is a much more important goal for many.
Safari “getting snappier” with every OS update is a running gag in at least the MacRumors community. Or has been for quite a while. Maybe it’s retired now, much like the old gold “but will it run Crysis?” one.
By now, Safari should be so snappy it opens your pages and have their document tree ready two seconds before you think of doing it.
I agree that a clock should absolutely open faster than a browser, but it would be good to know what this metric actually represents. I don't know much about this style of universal binaries, so I don't know if the binary being "true 5-arch universal binaries" is the focus of the application start time metric.
Support for different architectures doesn't impact start time much. The code for the different archs is in different chunks of the file.
Linking more libraries slows down launch due to initialization that happens to get the libraries ready to use. Besides that it's mostly what the app itself is doing on startup.
So yes, beating Safari for a tiny app is… a good thing, but not very impressive.