I'll share an anecdotal opinion contrary to the article. I've been running the engineering team at a startup for 3 years now and our app is still 100% cordova. We passed 100k actives over a year ago.

There are many benefits to native apps from the experience polish to the community and resources surrounding them. There are 2 major negatives to native: dev time and cost.

The Native vs Cordova/SomethingElse discussion is going to have different answers depending on your use case. Let me restate that for importance. Your use case will dictate which is "correct" early on.

For us, the rapid product tests we were looking to run, in both web and mobile platforms with a very small engineering team all but required a cordova app. As our product has grown more mature, and major client features change less frequent, the appeal of native has grown. But despite that appeal, we remain firmly in cordova and will for at least another 6 months.

That sounds absurd to me, go hybrid first then go native once it takes off, you can write your app in JavaScript and have an app that runs in all major mobile devices and a website, I'm not sure how can be beat unless money isn't a problem, such as massive initial funding.

Or you can write a native app and get 10-20k installs for free from a feature on the app store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Most native apps are not featured. Polish isn't cheap.

Depends on the product. Winnie's target demo is millennial parents who are mobile power users, so we knew the apps had to be best-in-class and we were prepared to invest in them.

Not all products need to invest in amazing apps or apps at all, but if you don't have a decent app than ASO and featuring are not going to be available to you. This may or may not be important to your business.