[Wolfr_]

I hope to see the day that given the right development attention one can make a web app that feels fast like a native app. It might already be possible for some kinds of apps.

There are apps popping up that are really an ember or angular one pager wrapped in a native shell.

HTML/CSS on Webkit gives you an amazing layout engine for free. Building UI for native apps feels like "web coding like it's 1999" with a lot of absolute positioning and use of sprited images. I wonder if things improved in iOS7.

[jordanthoms]

That's an iOS issue, not one inherent with native apps. Android/Qt/Windows Phone/literally any other toolkit provide flexible layouts which are much more powerful and often easier to use than CSS. And if you need a custom layout, you can actually write a new layout manager which is just as fast or faster than the built in ones, no javascript to set absolute positions on everything.

[cheneytsai]

We're trying to do just that with Pickie (iPad personalized magazine app) . Still alot left to do to squeeze out every bit of performance though.