2 ms·

you've just described every website, ever, yet they have managed to become quite popular despite the superior performance of native applications.

potatolicious 14y ago
Right-o, except these webview-driven apps have all the weaknesses of websites and none of the advantages. A website, from the perspective of the user, has the advantage of being entirely frictionless - anyone with a browser can use any website anywhere without downloading, installing, or configuring anything, and it's always up to date. A webview-driven app still gets out of date, and still presents the significant friction of making the user install something... all the while enjoying none of the usability benefits of going native. It should also be noted that the performance gap between web and native on desktops is at least two orders of magnitude less than it is on mobile. The difference between a website vs. a connected native app on desktop can be something on the order of milliseconds - below user-perceptible time. The difference between, say, the iOS browser vs. a connected native app, is on the order of seconds, if not tens of seconds. On a desktop with a broadband connection, the difference between a highly optimized 1KB JSON call vs. a 500KB full HTML-CSS-JS content blob is really a rounding error - below user-perceptible time. On a mobile that translates into seconds where the user is entirely non-interactive - and this is before we even get into the performance difference in rendering and input. Hell, part of the reason why apps have taken off in mobile (where they haven't on desktop) is because of this crucial difference. People hate using websites on mobiles, even mobile-optimized ones. The browser is such a poor experience on most mobiles that people will actively seek out the Store/Market, authenticate, and download huge binaries just to get the better UX.

potatolicious 14y ago

Right-o, except these webview-driven apps have all the weaknesses of websites and none of the advantages. A website, from the perspective of the user, has the advantage of being entirely frictionless - anyone with a browser can use any website anywhere without downloading, installing, or configuring anything, and it's always up to date. A webview-driven app still gets out of date, and still presents the significant friction of making the user install something... all the while enjoying none of the usability benefits of going native. It should also be noted that the performance gap between web and native on desktops is at least two orders of magnitude less than it is on mobile. The difference between a website vs. a connected native app on desktop can be something on the order of milliseconds - below user-perceptible time. The difference between, say, the iOS browser vs. a connected native app, is on the order of seconds, if not tens of seconds. On a desktop with a broadband connection, the difference between a highly optimized 1KB JSON call vs. a 500KB full HTML-CSS-JS content blob is really a rounding error - below user-perceptible time. On a mobile that translates into seconds where the user is entirely non-interactive - and this is before we even get into the performance difference in rendering and input. Hell, part of the reason why apps have taken off in mobile (where they haven't on desktop) is because of this crucial difference. People hate using websites on mobiles, even mobile-optimized ones. The browser is such a poor experience on most mobiles that people will actively seek out the Store/Market, authenticate, and download huge binaries just to get the better UX.