How about PWA, Service Workers, WebAssembly? Thousands of developers are working hard on improving the UX, reduce battery usage, wasted CPU cycles, network traffic, latency.

All of this because they're externalizing costs onto users through SPAs and other go-to practices that force all the work onto users' devices.

it's been that way since forever. if you're not employing expensive top-ranked brilliant engineers writing aggressively optimized, completely bespoke c applications tuned to every cpu model's feature set and performance characteristics... you just might be externalizing.

insofar as it benefits the budget, you should probably externalize as much as possible. consumers will provide the fitness function through deciding what products they prefer.

We're not even discussing aggressively optimized C vs web stack. We're talking about a massive segment of today's software developers not even bothering to learn competent C (or Obj-C, Swift, Java, whatever) to build a native application. Hell, it's about the very practice of calling Electron apps native to begin with. The same thing continues to hold across web stack everywhere—reach only for those things that don't require you to learn a new language/paradigm, letting you keep churning out the same thing you build in a browser and call it native for platform X, and let it be on the user to pony up the resources to use it.

hm... performance metrics, possibly? it may be hard to measure.