What Web Can Do Today
More stuff the web can&#x27;t do that native apps can do:<p>* Request stuff from arbitrary URLs without a CORS proxy<p>* Open TCP and UDP sockets<p>* Be in the play store&#x2F;app store AS a web app (home screen installation isn&#x27;t enough; people still search for your thing in the app store, so even if the other problems aren&#x27;t issues for your app, you <i>still</i> have to wrap your web app in a dummy native framework and upload it if you want users to discover you)<p>* Scroll like a native app without Safari&#x27;s stupid rubber band scrolling the entire app at very erratic times<p>* Barometric sensors<p>* Background geolocation, background anything really<p>* launchActivityForResult so you can work with other native goodies<p>* Intent resolution for native actions<p>* Geolocation when the user has inadvertently blanket-blocked Geolocation for all of Safari instead of per-webpage. Thankfully Chrome comes pre-approved on Android and you can&#x27;t accidentally make this mistake as a user<p>* Face tracking and other OpenCV-based stuff (it&#x27;s been done, but JS is still not fast enough on mobile to handle these jobs)<p>* Display long lists of styled content and scroll without stalling<p>Still though I think touch gestures is really the killer missing feature. There isn&#x27;t any canonically-supported way to do things like a simple Android ViewPager or pinch-to-zoom. You end up implementing a bunch of spaghetti code to do these things even in the best frameworks (Meteor, Phonegap + Polymer, Angular et al.). And then you find out the way your spaghetti code reacts is a tad different from the way someone else&#x27;s spaghetti code reacts to the same gestures. This stuff really needs to be standardized on a OS, browser, or <i>at least</i> JS-framework level.