>There is no reason PWAs couldn't run as well as native in most cases

I mean, PWAs by definition run inside a VM that has to provide a very heavy runtime, don't they?

This isn't a (comparatively) minimal like the JVM -- this is usually a Chromium instance, with the full V8 engine, Canvas and DOM support, and sandboxing.

It's not reasonable to say that something with this much baggage should be able to run as quickly as a native application, which can often afford to have a much more minimal sandbox, no bytecode layer, a smaller memory footprint, and more deliberate and performant integration with underlying system APIs.

If you do not count the browser itself - a single web app has a very small memory footprint. For comparison you can have hundreds of web apps running at the same time - taking up less memory then one native app! Then there are Electonr/nw.js apps that all come with their own browser, but PWA's will reuse and share the existing browser.

Which is why I said "most cases". It's a small percentage of apps that require maxing out a device's resources. I even mention elsewhere in this thread that they are not as performant as native. You can make vague statements about VM characteristics but in practice they won't have a real impact on most use cases.

Most Android devices are cheap and underpowered. It is not hard to max out the resources of your average $225 phone.

That average includes the developed world. The average Android phone is even worse in the developing world.

Native application has level of access to OS features and computer peripherals that PWA can only dream of. Same about performance.

But yes there are classes of applications for which underlying implementation technology does not matter much while browser based access from anywhere is more important.