Not anymore. Last gen phones have enough performance to run webapps without a single loss in performance, look and feel compared to native apps.
Native apps will remain, but you see more and more SPAs wrapped in a hybrid app still maintaining a 'native'look.
Costs of developing webapps is dramatically lower. Although native knowledge is still required for Auth, billing, advertising and other required native stuff.
I still have to see a single webapp that is as performant and feels the same as a native one. We might get there, and lots of companies are happy to release a half-backed webapp today, but that is definitely not the experience today.
I could post a mini saas that I made in php and mysql, using jQuery on the front end, that outperforms just about any webapp and most modern local apps, but I don't want to attract too much attention because I'm sure technically it's easily breakable to pros and malicious people.
Also, it runs on a $4 a month namecheap server.
Why is so fast? Because I came from the land of slow crms, and performance was my #1 goal. Instead of making it faster to develope, I made it faster for the end user.
Is that a worthwhile business goal? I don't know. But I know it's fast.
Render speed of browser engines is really good these days on mobile phones. Getting fluid animations is maybe even easier and faster with css than with the Android sdk or ios. Plenty of frameworks out there to create nice SPAs.
Some parts still have to be native like Auth, billing etc. But majority of the app can be web.
Why would the browser render engine slower than the Java Android UI render engine?
I am almost certain that the browser css engine is better optimized than the Android native render. IOS is a different story since their render engine is heavily optimized against their own hardware. But still I know that webapps can have the same performance as native apps. And the end of mobile native UI kits will finally arrive. Webapps/spas will take over.
They do, but they are the exception, not the rule. The bulk of the free software that I use I use locally, in fact I don't think I use even a single package that is a free software web app that is operated by some third party and if it were then I probably would try to find an alternative.
