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Yes however for users Interface speed = speed. Native apps have more leeway in faking the feeling of speed because even if you're waiting for a request you can still fill out the rest of the interface and start using it. HTML5 can feel sluggish because even a 100ms delay is noticeable to the user.

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But again: the latency is coming from downloading the assets... you are not going to get a 100ms latency from using a web view unless you are doing something wrong. I use web views in my app, and the views that can be built from local or cached content are honestly native performance (if you feel spinning up a webview itself takes a while: just keep a pool of them, it really isn't that hard), but the things that require talking to a server are considered slow (to which I respond "duh").

This is one thing I've wondered wrt the current FB Apple app. I wonder if they pool/cache their UIWebViews or if they're instantiated each time.

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