I didn&#x27;t mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I&#x27;m talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they&#x27;re the most notorious about being slow, even as their hardware performance approaches what PCs were like just a few years ago. Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything from the Win98 era, e.g. iTunes until a couple of years ago. By contrast, the cheapest Third World market smartphone would run Win98 apps blinding fast.<p>In general there&#x27;s an arms race between hardware getting faster and native developers getting more and more lazy about efficiency. On the desktop, the hardware is finally winning--it&#x27;s just too damn fast. Hopefully that will happen with smartphones too.