Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
As a web developer, I honestly hope the author of this post is wrong. Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure. They load slowly and consistently feel sluggish in comparison to proper native apps. Slack takes seconds to load and it&#x27;ll happily sit on over a gig of ram while in use. (And remember, its a glorified IRC client.)<p>Web apps only have two benefits over native apps:<p>1. They&#x27;re easier to build in a cross-platform way, because you just have to make the app once<p>2. Users don&#x27;t need to install anything<p>I hope in the long run we solve both of those problems for native apps and move back to writing applications which don&#x27;t depend on a DOM implementation to run. React-native is a great step toward solving (1). I hope that in time we can have modern (reactish), good looking cross-platform toolkit for native app development.<p>But the biggest hurdle is (2), which very few people are attacking. App stores have helped a lot, but we need to be able to run native apps without installing anything. It should be as easy as it is on the web. Unfortunately native app authors usually assume all their assets are bundled. Nobody even thinks about how long it takes from the point when a user decides to install an app to when they see the first content. On the web we count that time in milliseconds and on native apps we count minutes. There aren&#x27;t any hard technical problems there - we obviously manage it on the web, so its easily possible. We need native apps to catch up if they are ever going to be able to compete as a platform.