This is absolutely not true. Think about any kind of dynamic dashboard or data management platform. Having full page reloads for any minor change to filters, etc, is simply an unacceptable UX. But it has to be web-based because you need to be able to access it from any device, anywhere, without installing an app.

Plus, on a personal level, there are many services for which I will never install a native app—because I don't use it often, or because the native app provides no added benefit, or for one of a hundred other reasons. Those services don't get my business if they don't have a web app.

Theere's no reason a static contnt page must require JS Simply to render text, with a blank page as fallback.

Better ways of addressing the dashboaard example might be worth considering.

Too: bullshit dashboards with JS-based fakery;

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/8/13571216/new-york-times-e...

In all seriousness, there is a big difference between static content pages and full-blown applications; the cost to make the latter work properly without JS enabled is almost never worth it. But the same is true even for some static pages; for instance, I would never expect that NY times election forecast page to work without JavaScript, and don't see any reason that it should. (The "JS-based fakery" is pretty irrelevant to the discussion, IMO.)

And: Sampling bias. A simple static page shouldn't require development. Hence, anyone doing web dev will have experience skewed strongly to more complex designs.

How would you describe the basic underlying structure and mechanics of a typical app you've built?

I strongly prefer single-page web apps over native apps. Web apps are constrained by my browser. Native apps get a lot more trust.

Native apps have a performance benefit at the expense of everything we take for granted on the web, like being able to open up a developer console and inspect it.

For example, I noticed that the top language translation app on the Mac App Store incurs a Google Analytics request for every keystroke. And since there's no easy network tab I can open on any app, I only found it out because I was curious how it worked and mitm'd it with a proxy. And I couldn't just toss uBlock Origin at it to de-trackify it like I can any web app.

Doesn't seem like a 100% epic win for users to me. In fact, the only upside I can even think of is that it probably uses less RAM than a Chrome tab opened to Google Translate. Let's slow down and acknowledge the trade-offs before we go all-in on HN memes like native app superiority.

Nothing in software engineering is absolute. And even if something were to be 100% the correct solution one day, the next it could change.

I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a sandbox.

This is probably not what you had in mind, and I'm not sure how good it would be at sandboxing, but REBOL Reblets imho come close to this <http://www.rebol.com/reblets.html>

Electron comes close, but many don’t like it at all. (I have somewhat mixed experiences, I love VS Code but I’m not too fond of Slack.)

Mike Acton once said something about having created a browser plugin his team used that loaded and ran binary exe tools on demand, but that it was also wildly insecure. At least I think he said something like that. My memory could be wrong about that.

Citation?

No.