&gt; Hence why social networks and email clients are created as apps now<p>I think a large part of the definition of &quot;application&quot; is subjective, personally I think social networks, such as a forum or twitter suffer from being an &quot;application&quot;. You want to benefit from SEO, fast loading, responsive design, accessibility etc. However a chat app, that&#x27;s personal and contains ephemeral content is a much better candidate for an application. I expect to see a different setup from other users, I don&#x27;t want it to be searched, I expect different experiences on different devices etc.<p>Another good example is tweetdeck vs twitter. One is very personal and customizable, the other is essentially a generic and universal between users.<p>I think we are entering a phase of &quot;everything is a single page app&quot; because it&#x27;s interesting and exciting. Similarly to the early days of mobile of flash development. Hopefully in a few years there will be a renaissance of the simple webpage, and application frameworks will be reserved for the use cases they really make sense for.