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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> In my opinion, native mobile apps have been always an intermediary and I wouldn't mind seeing all of them going away if some better web app alternative comes along.

As primarily a user of mobile apps I would mind. A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look and feel of either major mobile OS.

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> A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to.

That's one of many things that web apps have been fixing. It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app.

> In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look and feel of either major mobile OS.

They do, however, look like web apps everywhere, and if you primarily use web apps, you'll feel right at home.

  > It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app.

Yeah. It is entirely possible to make web app do a lot of things. Even do them cross-platform. Even to get almost native feel. But when you are done doing it you understand, that going native even on each platform would be faster and cheaper.

And thus the reasons to keep trying to improve those stories. Offline is import for applications. Many web applications make perfect sense to also work offline, and if that can be done easily, then what's the argument? I'd agree that looking like a native app by matching look and feel is probably not a great plan, but I also just fundamentally don't understand the attitude of saying that the web should be relegated to blogs/news/wikipedia style pages and leave everything else to native app silos.

Except the complaint about inconsistencies in native UI toolkits to argue in favor of web apps makes no sense, since by definition web apps have no singular look and feel whatsoever beyond the basic semantics of hypertext and browser navigation -- assuming the app doesn't break them. (and then WIMP has its own mostly consistent semantics too)

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