I think you're underestimating the complexity of native apps. To duplicate functionality of a web app, you're still going to need to know your networking layer, whatever it is, and you still need to write a server and persistence layer; the only difference is on the client, where instead of HTML/CSS/JS you're building in one language... plus probably a GUI framework (which are not exactly known for their simplicity or ease of use). And there are security issues related to distributing native binaries too. When you say there are tons of extra 'hoops' to jump through, what do you mean?