I'm going to go against the tide of opinion and say a good app done well does add to the user experience. And what really constitutes an 'app'? Does the voting

I'm going to go against the tide of opinion and say a good app done well does add to the user experience. And what really constitutes an 'app'? Does the voting up/down experience in hackernews constitute an app because it doesn't refresh the page? A site can have varying amount of dynamic content so there is no hard line. When it's done wrong, yes it's a poor experience and is most likely done for doing it sake. With no thought to the UX experience or performance. Twitter using hash urls for the first time was one. But if you design it from a UX and performance perspective it can work well. Especially if you allow it degrade gracefully. For example Google maps, or Google docs etc. But also stuff like a search app like airbnb.com. An app can have better performance then pure html pages as when you transition you can have it smoother, and only load the differences. It can improve interaction as the whole page isn't cleared and then refreshed. Google is recommending going this way for web performance https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/prpl-pattern/ https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/p... I think in this thread we are only remembering web apps that have gone horribly bad, like reddit for example. But we don't remember it when it just works