The reason native is better for mobile apps is not that the browser's rendering engine isn't fast. It's that the browser is yet another turtle on top of an alre

The reason native is better for mobile apps is not that the browser's rendering engine isn't fast. It's that the browser is yet another turtle on top of an already bloated stack. He argues that the developers working on these browsers are optimizing them, and that we are not intelligent enough to trump their obviously superior coding skills. Well, I'm going to disagree outright on that point. Many of us are very talented. Add Webkit on top of the Dalvik VM and android SDK, and fragmented device ecosystem, and we're talking major disparities between the way your HTML5 app is going to run on different android devices. I have seen HTML5 apps that work great on phone a and b, but not on c, because well, c has a different webkit version! It's bad enough to have to write code for different browsers. It's really bad to have to write code for different browsers that will run on hundreds of different android devices. Back to the point you made about optimization: don't you think the developers of the native SDKs are making optimizations, too? And the lower level means we're way closer to the metal, lower on the stack, and ergo: less complex. I'd use HTML5 for a trivial app, like, a business's mobile website. But for anything serious, GO NATIVE! Note, my answer is for mobile browsers, specifically android. Even iOS should be marginally better on this, but really I've only seen HTML5 kicking ass on desktop browsers. I've yet to be impressed by it in mobile.