I agree but there really has been a lot of progress lately. Service Workers allowing offline, web notifications, and just today I read that Chrome webapp will appear in Android as if they are full apps.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
> The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
Many times needlessly low expectations of both developers and managers are the blame for this. Yes, there are certain elaborate UI effects that are genuinely difficult to do well on web. But when there's a full second lag after pressing a button, or a menu slides into view at 3fps, the platform is not the problem.
A native app that has incredibly choppy, laggy UI for simple interactions wouldn't make it past many engineering managers or PMs. But when there's needlessly a full second lag after pressing a button on a web app everyone shrugs, inaccurately blames it on the web platform (instead of piss poor engineering), and it's out to production furthering the stereotype that web apps are inherently jank.
As a web development community we need to stop this cycle. Web engineers need to stop building, and engineering managers need to stop approving, web apps with needlessly janky, laggy UI for even rudimentary interactions.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.