Why Native Apps Really Are Doomed: Native Apps Are Doomed Pt 2

I'm surprised this ends up being as controversial as it is. Either the capabilities of web technologies that are here or coming (webasm) what can be done with a web page is increasing. How many native apps are even compiled natively? Webasm actually has the potential to be faster than many native apps at the same time.

Recording audio on mobile browsers in a cross-platform way still isn't solved yet (it's been years):

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-record-audio-using-the-iPhone...

Remember, due to Apple regulations, any browser on iOS (including the Chrome app) is actually just a thin shell around Safari. It HAS to be Safari, no custom browsers allowed.

This really stifles progress when it comes to the many "bleeding edge" web technologies that are required for web apps to truly replace native apps.

Unfortunately, browsers are still far behind in general.

I've been the hybrid/web guy for a long time, but recently I realized native apps are not going anywhere. (I'm stil in the "I don't need your app" camp, but it doesn't change this realization).

The issue is, most of the "apps" do not need to be apps, they can well be web pages. Everyone thinks they need "an app" because it's hot this year. But for apps that make more sense being an app, native is much better solution.

For example, for apps that need to store data and work reliably offline, I'd much more trust a native app than any PWA despite of all the services workers and other stuff that it implements.

(Side rant: I hate governments spending public money on apps for two selected, closed ecosystems, instead of producing a good interoperable webapp).

From purely technical point of view, in my experience (writing Cordova app, and reading about NativeScript and other technologies) is that all of the "write once, use on 10 platforms" frameworks are typically more polished for iOS than for Android, or vice versa.

We've built two Cordova apps in the last time, one with Ionic, one earlier with proprietary framework. While they work okayish on Android, the UX on iOS is rather horrible due to a number of smallish issues that when added up, sum to a big difference.

Next, with Cordova et al. you can do easy things easily, but hard things are hard or impossible; you are always behind the native platform capabilities (which change very often and fast), which give a lot more power.

Edit: The point of cost of getting users into a native app is fair, I very very rarely download new apps. This only gets harder as app stores get bombarded with thousands of apps each week. But it doesn't mean native apps should be totally abandoned. They have their place in the ecosystem.

Javascript Developer: SPA/PWAs are better!

Swift Developer: Native apps are better!

Reality: both will be around for a long time and both have their appropriate use cases. At some point they may converge but we are far from it.

Also, creating any app (web or native) and hoping to achieve widespread success is a gamble.

> The issue is, most of the "apps" do not need to be apps, they can well be web pages. Everyone thinks they need "an app" because it's hot this year.

Why is "being a webpage" suddenly the default state of an application?

I'd rather turn this around and say:

"The issue is, most of the webpages do not need to be webpages, they can well be native apps. Everyone thinks they need 'a webpage' because it's hot this year."