Actually most are making native mobile apps. I'm a mobile guy making a cross compatible web app. Why anyone would make a native app in our world of ECMAScript6 and HTML5 is beyond me.
There are many reasons to build native apps in the enterprise IT (business software) world. For certain use cases, access to offline data and fast performance become critical requirements.
Think of a traveling sales rep who is on the road and needs access to a product catalog and pricing information to take sales orders. HTML5 doesn't quite cut it in such a scenario.
In several industries, sales reps often travel to locations without internet access (such as factory shop-floors, construction sites, mining sites etc). In such cases, the rep simply has to fire up the product catalog, capture orders, take notes etc and then sync up when he returns to an office/hotel room.
This is in fact one of the most common reasons for companies to look for native apps.
I've not worked with Breeze but have seen a couple of other HTML5-based frameworks that promise "native-like" capabilities. For the data-heavy enterprise world, none of them have worked.
Where do you get the statistic that "most" HN folks are making native mobile apps? Are you sure it's not server-side software, or machine-independent code, or something else?
i.e. [citation needed]
Also, the reasons people make native mobile apps rather than hybrid apps (which run inside a mobile web-player component) are speed and reliability. Famously, Facebook switched from HTML5 to native for their iOS app:
Maybe less so the case with HN but certainly the case. Just look at Product Hunt where nearly half of today's posts are mobile native apps. Facebook has since built and released React. I'm willing to bet Facebook will switch away from native again.
Facebook is building something they call React Native, which, as I understand it, lets you code an app using JavaScript and web stuff, but then it transforms all of that into native code that gets compiled to run on the various mobile operating systems. I think it's currently iOS-only. Facebook says they're already using it for multiple production apps, but I don't know which ones.