> And it also helps a bit that the API's are super easy to work with.
Not in the least, you have to be comfortable in a half-dozen technologies at least to make a half-decent web application. You want performance, animations, etc then you better be an expert. And even then, your perfect container is a limited container.
By comparison, building a native app is much simpler. The complication comes in with cross-platform applications.
I disagree. I'm still a fairly new developer and I've tried developing both native and web apps. I found that there are thousands of great well documented frameworks that make developing web high performance web apps easy. Meteorjs for example took me about a weekend to learn, has a huge community with lots of prebuilt packages, and countless tutorials that make implementing smooth animation incredibly easy. Before Meteorjs I used Angularjs and found mostly the same thing. I'm sure it's similar with React or even just standalone Javascript Html and CSS3.
Not in the least, you have to be comfortable in a half-dozen technologies at least to make a half-decent web application. You want performance, animations, etc then you better be an expert. And even then, your perfect container is a limited container.
By comparison, building a native app is much simpler. The complication comes in with cross-platform applications.