Of course web apps aren't ever going to be as fast as a native application They can be pretty close because web apps are ultimately just duct tape over native

Of course web apps aren't ever going to be as fast as a native application They can be pretty close because web apps are ultimately just duct tape over native code. Further I doubt Apple's lack of JIT for app-contained webviews has any material effect: JavaScript performance is grossly overconsidered, when most of the performance issues are DOM/layout problems (e.g. scrolling long lists). LinkedIn to this day remain the perfect example of how to build a straight-up HTML5 mobile app that performs beautifully. After making a big show about their web-based mobile app, LinkedIn started recanting and replacing major components of their app with native code, so they aren't the best example. But ultimately a lot of the people who cheerlead these sorts of discussions don't realize how little it has to do with what they do, because these people are talking about optimizing those final few percentages. Anecdote time, but I was involved with a team of 6 devs making some basic fund reporting tools when a breathless product manager started talking about how we should build iOS and Android apps because someone had told them about LinkedIn's pronouncement that their "power users" preferred their native rebuild. A tiny, grossly underequipped team that nonetheless managed to make a pretty kick-ass web app that actually worked great on pretty much any device people could have (including rich graphics)...yeah, fire up the iOS team to divert resources on a native app... It is nonsense. If you have a software group large enough that you can start optimizing for those edge cases (e.g. scroll a massive list of contacts) where the web apps suffer, then of course you should do it. But for the vast majority of teams simply making a cross-platform web app gets you 98% of the way there.