&gt; At which point you have to ask whether the missing things are actually that important.<p>Right. And the choice of programming language isn&#x27;t.<p>&gt; &quot;Native code&quot; in this context is as distinguished from aggressively sandboxed javascript received over the network in real-time... It&#x27;s about the app still working where there is no wireless signal, or being able to read or write device-wide settings or files, or make a VPN work, etc.<p>Firefox OS had all of those capabilities (maybe excluding VPN depending on your definition--but if your definition of &quot;making a VPN work&quot; excludes Firefox OS it excludes iOS apps too). Firefox OS was based on locally installed apps.