> For developers, Cordova/PhoneGap-style tools are not a panacea either. It's easy to get an 80% solution done, but then you run into problems with mobile browser performance.
That is a thing of the past. At the current rate of smartphone/phablet specs growth the differences with desktop are laughable (you can currently get 64bit octacore@1.7Ghz mobile devices with 3Gb of RAM for around $100) [0]. And this will only continue to grow. 16core and 32cores will be here in 2-3 years [1].
IMO, hybrid apps are already the present. The difficult times when we didn't have the required performance in our pockets are long gone... and frameworks like Ionic are really convenient for certain use cases.
> browser differences between devices (even Android devices with the same base OS can have very different web view browser engines)
That has been already solved with xwalk [2]... but again, this will be irrelevant in a couple of years.
the amount of cores makes no difference when javascript is single threaded. Infact its often detrimental especially on mobile because each individual core is significantly weaker.
Plenty of websites doing advanced html5 gunk bring top of the line systems to their knees.
Ok, valid point... But still the Ghz's per core are also increasing, and with that the overall performance. If you've used webapps like Popcorn-time or Slack you'll understand what I'm trying to say.
Are they native? No, they're JS apps
Do the users care? No, cos they do the "job" pretty well
We're reaching that computing power with mobile devices. In fact current mobiles are like desktops of 3/4 years ago. For certain kind of apps it won't matter if they're built with web technologies. (I'm not saying that you should bet on WebGL vs OpenGLES)
That is a thing of the past. At the current rate of smartphone/phablet specs growth the differences with desktop are laughable (you can currently get 64bit octacore@1.7Ghz mobile devices with 3Gb of RAM for around $100) [0]. And this will only continue to grow. 16core and 32cores will be here in 2-3 years [1].
IMO, hybrid apps are already the present. The difficult times when we didn't have the required performance in our pockets are long gone... and frameworks like Ionic are really convenient for certain use cases.
> browser differences between devices (even Android devices with the same base OS can have very different web view browser engines)
That has been already solved with xwalk [2]... but again, this will be irrelevant in a couple of years.
[0] http://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_152602.html
[1] http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130304235830_Pres...
[2] https://crosswalk-project.org/