"High battery consumption and no way to control background services"

- Doesn't apply to iOS apps and background services are controllable and automatically shutdown unless there is specific purpose such as streaming music. Apps abusing these rules will be rejected and removed from app store.

"- 100% access to local user data"

- Completely false. No access whatsoever unless explicitly granted by the user.

"Fast and unsafe languages such as C and C++ (yes they also come in the SDK tooling)"

True, but marginally used and personally I'll take fast and unsafe rather than slow and unsafe.

"Fast with WebGL 2.0, and proper use of hardware accelerated CSS"

"WebAssembly"

- Valid points. These really are positive developments in terms of web dev. AFAIK WebGL would only give benefits in games and then you would be limited by connection and the process resources of the browser app. WebAssembly is cool, yet 99.999% of cases are basic React apps that don't get any benefits from either of these.

"Limited access is actually a positive"

- Not being able to make the app that you want to make as an web app can be seen as positive I suppose. In native apps there is not direct access to almost anything, but once permissions are given, apps can fully utilize the OS/Hardware features.

85% of the world doesn't enjoy those iOS benefits, as per mobile OS market share.

Global market share is not relevant. Target group(s) of the industry the application will be developed for and market share of iOS users amongst them is.

In English, unless you are developing apps for poor developing countries, you have to consider iOS users and often the iOS is the lead platform.

Couple of years ago I was developing app for well known Fortune 500 consumer brand in China and while iOS market share was about 15%, amount of iOS users for our apps were about 33% (1/3). When it came to customers actually using money iOS marketshare was somewhere around 40-50%.

Do you develop apps targeted at China, India, etc? Once you ignore developing countries, the market share of iOS grows a lot higher. If you target North America for instance, you’re close to 50%

Yeah, up to 28% in Europe, our main market.

> - High battery consumption and no way to control background services

Are you drunk? Native apps are orders of magnitude more efficient than browser rendered pages.

Also, wtf are you talking about, on Android your application will be literally killed if you don't post a foreground notification and do something in background without user's notice.

> - 100% access to local user data

Hello SAF and scoped storage, the future is here.

> - Fast and unsafe languages such as C and C++ (yes they also come in the SDK tooling)

?

It is always a matter of how they are programmed. And no, I am not drunk.

Thanks for registering yourself to make such constructive remarks.

iOS - you can disable background processes on a per app basis.

A local app doesn’t have access to a data outside of its own sandbox unless the user explicitly gives it to them and then it’s still limited.

A feature available to 13.4% of mobile phone population across the world.

The iPhone is available in almost all of the world. Whether they choose to buy one is a different story.

But as far as “availability”, how many people have high end Android phones with decent GPUs for “with WebGL 2.0, and proper use of hardware accelerated CSS”? Most Android phones sold are low end with crappy hardware.

More than those that can afford iDevices.

I target devices that customers actually have, not what they might have on local store windows.

The average selling price of an Android phone is $250. How many of those have decent GPUs or perform well enough to run web apps as well as native apps?

Ironically, iPhones do better on web benchmarks than almost any Android phone.

Plenty, if one doesn't bomb them with SPAs to draw static text.

That may be true, but you specifically said....

Web apps:

- Fast with WebGL 2.0, and proper use of hardware accelerated CSS

- Limited access is actually a positive

- WebAssembly

None of that is going run well on the average low end Android phone.