Ah yes, nothing is better than waiting 5 minutes for the native Facebook iPhone app to boot up. But seriously, I've mostly switched from facebook to ello just because ello as a web app is faster than facebook as a mobile app.

Not all web apps are slow and not all native apps are fast. It's up to the developers to handle that, not the platform.

I see a lot of benefits of building and using web apps over native ones.

As a developer I can really focus on using the browser as my runtime. Meaning my app will, for the most part, run on most devices. It's also easier to maintain. If I need push a patch or update, I just edit some javascript.

As a user, I know that when I switch from device to device I won't need to go through an install process. All I need is a url.

Why can't the web be for games or text editors? Some of the most useful text editors I've used are on the web. What about WebRTC? Should we still all be using the Skype desktop app instead?

I would probably say that it's lazier not to make your app work well on the web.

Besides, I'd rather have an app that takes a little longer to start up, but performs well, than an app that first requires starting a web browser and then on top of that has an interface that runs like a snail.

Also, even if it is the phone, that's still an issue with native apps. The fb web app loads faster (still not great, but faster) than the iOS app boots up.

First of all, webapps almost always screw something up in the UI. If they're wrapped in a native container maybe they scroll differently, they don't respond to some gestures, are missing some menu entires or make other small mistakes. Depending on the user this can be mildly annoying or just strange for them.

Secondly, web apps make customers dependent on something they have no control of. That cool startup might close shop tomorrow and if you're lucky they'll give you one week to export your data. The company might decide to pivot or charge more or a myriad other possibilities and the customer has no choice but to either cancel the service or deal with it. I can give you an example of many iOS users that are still on 7 because some apps were broken by the update - they can do that with apps and we're talking about iOS here, desktop is even more flexible.

Thirdly, speed. Ironically, Facebook themselves admitted that they made a huge mistake by using webviews because this made their app incredibly slow. Your case is almost impossible to believe, and indicates that something is completely broken in your software configuration. In most cases a native app will outperform a web app, from the UI speed (scrolling, panning, drag & drop, viewing documents) to performing various tasks. It's quite logical, as a native app has direct access to all APIs, while a webapp has to go through N intermediate layers.

    > Ah yes, nothing is better than waiting 5 minutes for the native
    > Facebook iPhone app to boot up. But seriously, I've mostly 
    > switched from facebook to ello just because ello as a web app is 
    > faster than facebook as a mobile app.

Native is hard relative to (the nearly thoughtless) slapping together of JS and CSS frameworks to "build" an "app." It requires paying people more and taking more time to develop.

When compared with RAD tooling like Delphi or XAML, HTML/CSS/JS is anything but easy.

- It removes the risk of spending time and money learning what turns out to be the "wrong" (i.e. an unsuccessful) platform

- It avoids splitting the effort of tooling vendors, library authors, etc. across many different platforms, reducing the amount of redundant effort spent reimplementing things in platform Y that already exist in platform X and freeing them up to work on unique ideas instead

- It brings the largest possible number of people underneath one umbrella, which makes that community more economically attractive and therefore increases the number and quality of tools and services they have access to

Not that it's all sunshine and roses, of course, but it's not without advantages.

People who have never heard of specificity or modularity start writing code that will run on thousands of browsers, and in turn those users experience a slower web.

The other side of that mess is when developers with more experience thoroughly plan out the architecture of the web app, to ensure it operates on a performance budget and the user experience stays positive. Just as native apps, this also requires paying people more and taking more time to develop.

Having helped many organizations understand how to build JavaScript applications across a bunch of different platforms, from my experience what they are trying to do is improve their ability to iterate and remain responsive to user needs across all the devices users want to interact with.

As a user, I expect and prioritize applications and experiences that are available to me wherever I choose to use the service. Web stack tech is facilitating this.

Because innovation happens when you start thinking out of the box?

From the user's perspective, however, there's been a ton of innovation, and they (usually) don't know/care that most applications are built on houses of cards.

Historically, my language of choice for the server-side has been Java (I interned at an IBM lab that was involved in the creation of Eclipse, so I used it a lot at the start of my career). More recently, I've been dabbling in Ruby, and I'd also like to give Scala and Go a try.

For most of its history, HTML has been codifying usage rather than prescribing it. The one major exception—XHTML—was never widely adopted, partly for this reason.

* Web browsers already have a way of creating widgets rendering them, changing their skins

* There are many javascript libraries and frameworks, so can use those for connecting backends, processing events, etc.

* With a bit of luck you can run the same code as an actual web page.

* Desktop app is an after-thought today because web service/web page came first. The world of software applications with a GUI on top started with Desktop apps that were then adapted for the web. Today perhaps the opposite is true.

I'm pretty confident that this is the simplest way to build desktop apps in JS in Windows :)

So that people don't need to install, maintain or update applications, and can access them everywhere in the world using just a web browser? And because they're also more secure than traditional applications that you need to install on your PC?

Have you ever used a web app that changed in ways you didn't like?

no.