I'm sorry, that's incorrect. "Native apps" are ones that have been compiled down to machine code that's directly executable on whatever CPU or CPUs might be pr

I'm sorry, that's incorrect. "Native apps" are ones that have been compiled down to machine code that's directly executable on whatever CPU or CPUs might be provided by the device in question. Ahead-of-time compilation is thus required. As such, "native apps" cannot be represented solely in a higher-level code that is interpreted, regardless of how its interpreter may be implemented (this includes direct interpretation, JIT compilation, and so on). Apps built using interpreted JavaScript clearly are not "native" apps, unless we're dealing with hardware that directly executes JavaScript code. The ARM CPUs typically found in smartphones today don't do that. What you're describing is independent from the concept of "native apps". It's more about platform restrictions than it is about their capabilities. If an operating system like Firefox OS goes out of its way to not support real native apps, that doesn't mean that what it does support are "native" in any way. I don't know if there's a good term to use instead, but it surely does not involve the word "native" in any way, given that that term already has very specific and existing meaning.