I feel like many web developers want this to be true, but it is
categorically false.
When you target a higher level abstraction, be it web, or flutter or whatever, you are explicitly choosing not to follow the platform native UX.
It’s more convenient to developers not to have to worry about that.
That’s it.
Web is easy. It’s free.
That doesn’t mean it’s better, or that it’s even possible for it to be as good as a native experience.
You can make a web app that is good; but it is the unavoidable and undeniable reality that web applications have a glass ceiling.
It is. Not. Possible. to write a web app that is as good as the equivalent native application can be. Certainly not a cross browser one.
There are reasons, you can blame Apple and safari or whatever you want, but that’s where it’s at, today.
> The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.
It’s not a falsifiable argument.
“That is not as good because I believe less effort was put into it”.
Ok.
I believe that for the equivalent effort you could create a better web app than a native app. I think you could measure that, and it would be pretty clear.
However, I believe many large native applications could not be implemented using the web platform. I think react native and the disaster that is is a reasonably solid proof that this is true.
They’re worse because web is worse, not because they didn’t bother to put effort in; because it wasn’t possible to do it using the web platform.
Native is always better if you out the effort in. It has capabilities that web doesn’t.
It is impossible for it not to be better.