"So why bother with a native client? What’s in it for the user?" Well, if there were nothing in it for the user, no users would be complaining, and we wouldn'

"So why bother with a native client? What’s in it for the user?" Well, if there were nothing in it for the user, no users would be complaining, and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. The author is certainly right that multiple heterogenous development platforms incur an increased headache and expense, and that the web can get you a pretty good experience on lots of platforms. The argument then is that "pretty good" is good enough, and that the decreased support costs dominate the software quality and user experience. Maybe they are, maybe not. But as a software engineer, it's hard to get excited about the prospect of making our software suck more to save money.