It’s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app

> Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great.

There you have it. Using bleeding edge features will create a lot of problems. First you need to figure out what type of users you want to target, PC users with 24 inch monitors and keyboard? Or 12 year olds with iPads? But still, for your software to really work across as many units as possible, and continue to work for years, you have to look what existed 5-10 years ago, and only use those features that are still standard.

I have a mobile phone that no longer gets updates. It is HTML 5 compatible, so it should handle everything that is not bleeding edge, but still many web pages, for example medium.com does not work!

I remember being a web developer ten years ago, it was your professional duty do make sure it was pixel perfect on existing GUI based browsers and even look good on the text based ones. I think web dev's today is too quick to jump on the latest and greatest.

If you take a look at the browser features that existed 5-10 years ago, it's way behind the native phone app experience! It seems browser vendors totally missed the mobile explosion, and only lately have begun to catch up! Considering how fast the web tech moves now though, the future for web dev looks bright. I think that in in 5-10 years, the mobile browser experience will be on pair or even ahead of native, at least considering dev experience and cross device/platform support.

And for good reason. I don't want random websites burning my battery for their "oh so important" background tasks.

PhoneGap? I thought the point was the original author didn't want to ship shit. PhoneGap apps are generally terrible. PhoneGap is the preferred solution for CIOs that want to save money but end up delivering a glitchy crap product. JavaScript isn't the catch all savior many JS people seem to think it is.

CSS and JS animations are children's toys compared to Metal on iOS. You can make a far more beautiful and smooth experience with native apps than anything ever done on PhoneGap.

You want access to a new iOS API on PhoneGap? You have to wait until it's public. If you want to upgrade your app for iOS 10? You have to wait until iOS 10 is publicly released.

Anyone using PhoneGap is almost certainly someone who is unwilling to learn Swift. Nobody actually thinks PhoneGap is better.. It's just a convenient crutch for those who are unwilling to invest the time to do it right.

If you have to ship a mobile app because of some executive vanity for a mobile app-- go ahead use PhoneGap. But if you actually want to write the best app possible, delivering a great user experience (as well as device experience,) then learn the real thing.

Also, you missed the point of the article -- obviously the problems are 'his fault.' The point is that all of those problems are more painful than simply building a great mobile app.

Ehhh.... These examples seem really amateurish to me. You'll run into lots of issues developing for the web, sure, it's not perfect. Especially web "apps" that need to work cross-browser. But the listed problems stem from not understanding your platform, not problems inherent to the web itself.

To make an analogy, it's like the equivalent writing a native app where input and UI rendering are handled by the same thread, and then complaining that input doesn't work during intensive operations, so javascript / the web is better for apps, and native is terrible.

It's also an unfair comparison. These statements:

> We made a bet on the web. Built a responsive site for desktop and mobile and tried to avoid the native app space (still are).

And then later

> One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage. I can even use a framework to share work between the two.

So originally with the web, they're trying to target Desktop Chrome, Desktop Safari, Desktop Firefox, Desktop Edge, Mobile Chrome and Mobile Safari with one codebase. Then they move to only targeting Android and iOS (native mobile only) with two separate codebases? They could have just as easily targeted mobile Chrome and mobile Safari, and shared 100% of the code.

I'm not sure what they mean by a framework to share work between the two. If they're referring to something like Xamarin, I hope they've at least tried it before assuming everything works great. They're very unstable, and you still need separate codebases for your views, typically more. Ironically, the most stable ones of these I've tried have been web-dev based frameworks.

tl;dr: "It's cheaper to make an app for 2 platforms than for 8 you don't understand."

  > You just don't know if they are going to let you in.

You do know.