I replaced my native iOS app with a cross platform web app and no-one noticed
> Are native apps dead?
> Not yet… but they’re going to be.<p>This post makes very big claims based on a very basic application that doesn't seem to be much more than a few toggle buttons and a couple of animations thrown in, and some 'statistics' that don't appear to be based on any actual facts.<p>I work in a team developing an app that has around 5million users, and we abandoned an Ionic first version 5 years ago, after a couple of years of nightmarish development, where (after the first implementation, which went reasonably well) we spent most of our development time fixing inexplicable bugs, chasing native features, getting inconsistent UI problems, broken builds from package updates and a myriad other problems that just drained our energy and were generally dispiriting.<p>I personally felt the entire experience was a horrible professional dead-end. Luckily our management decided to switch to a native application, and learning Swift has been the most fulfilling part of my entire career. The application is faster, more reliable, the bugs are locatable and fixable; the entire framework feels solid and professional.<p>The application itself is immeasurably better now. We attracted better-qualified colleagues who have been a great learning resource. And the app itself went from an appstore rating of (iirc) around 2.8 stars to its current rating of 4.6.<p>We would never dream of going back to the nightmare that developing a complex and performant app with Ionic was in my experience.