I know this is a difficult thing to raise, but I question the assumption that the technologies underlying web frontends themselves are optimal for energy effici

I know this is a difficult thing to raise, but I question the assumption that the technologies underlying web frontends themselves are optimal for energy efficiency. Mobile devices are where power management matters the most, and this is where you find web tech used the least. At the dawn of the present mobile era, there was WebOS, which was built with web tech. The original iPhone unveil showed a phone that only supported web apps, and there was no App Store at all. Android came out of Google, a company that at that point depended completely on web APIs for rendering. Something clearly changed soon after that point, as web technologies were cast aside as the major mobile platforms evolved post-iPhone. Many people ascribe this situation to nefarious motives on Apple's part, and I am aware of their artificial restrictions, including the requirement that other browsers use webkit, the click delay, limited hardware API/camera access, etc. Still, this alone doesn't explain why the other players (especially Google) ended up prioritizing non-web apps. I hasten to add that something is definitely lost in the mobile app store model, namely the freedom of the user and of the content creator to put things on phones without filtering by reviewers. However, I think that issue is orthogonal to the energy efficiency discussion above. And I would be overjoyed to see this resolved in a way that enhances user and creator freedom, without any energy efficiency loss. I have worked with web tech for years, before I quit writing web apps about a year ago. I have spent the last few months learning Swift and Metal, and I can see the relative strengths and weaknesses in both web and native app paradigms. Given the above, I'd like to hear what you have to say: - Did Apple deprecate web apps simply because they couldn't control them, or is there more to it than that, as the above suggests? - Do web technologies have a bright future as a frontend application platform, or will they continue to be eclipsed on mobile devices by Swift and Kotlin, SwiftUI and Flutter? Will this trend continue as VR and AR adoption grows? Why or why not?