Well, here's not-at-all-hypothetical example: We're a really, really small shop, developing a webapp. We would love a mobile app before we launch, but nobody

Well, here's not-at-all-hypothetical example: We're a really, really small shop, developing a webapp. We would love a mobile app before we launch, but nobody here has ever developed a native app before - our experience is strictly related to web development targeting desktop browsers. We could probably throw together an HTML5 app for Android and iOS (phonegap, etc) pretty fast. Or I guess we could try and outsource development of native apps for Android and iOS, except we're not sure of cost, or risks, or how to find a developer, or whether the result would be up to our standards (our core selling point, is basically, "this webapp is like the others you've seen, but with a UI that'll blow you away"), so a slow HTML5 app is bad, but so is a clunky and ugly native app developed by someone who doesn't have the same obsession with attention to detail that we do. So...we've got a choice to make, and "native performs better" isn't enough. How much better? And what do you give up to get native? Does Sencha (or whatever) get you close enough for our purposes? How much harder is a good HTML5 app to develop compared to a cude wrapper around an existing site? These tradeoffs are not obvious, and for people currently evaluating options, I think they're interesting.