| Yeah it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, but two things seem true: 1) Native apps were better than web apps because of native performance was better. And as you say, we're seeing smart phones become mini PCs. I'm actually typing this on a PC I built years ago on which I still play the latest football and strategy games, but my girlfriend's smartphone has 1 gigabyte more RAM (3gb Nexus), twice as many cores at a similar speed and a 50% higher resolution, for a quick anecdotal example. I know it's apples and oranges technically but smartphones are becoming insanely powerful. And with the web evolving (things like GPU driven CSS animations being commonplace now) the majority of non-game apps are going to run just fine on PC-like hardware on phones in the next years with no performance difference from native. And with WebGL becoming the standard, one can say the same for many games now, too. 2) Native always had more access to the hardware. Things like the contact list, photos, file system, social accounts etc. Here too we're seeing the web evolve, but we're also seeing hybrid frameworks like Cordova or Ionic become very sophisticated which allow plugins to deal with native features using web technologies. Of course this hybrid app still goes through the app store in which Apple/Google are all powerful. But even on the web we're seeing tons of integrations for the core functionality like accessing the camera. I think 1) will be a no-brainer, native won't be much better than web. 2) will see a difference for quite some time, but here the difference is shrinking, too. Things like the camera or geolocation have been possible for quite some time. |