> And it also helps a bit that the API's are super easy to work with.
Not in the least, you have to be comfortable in a half-dozen technologies at least to make a half-decent web application. You want performance, animations, etc then you better be an expert. And even then, your perfect container is a limited container.
By comparison, building a native app is much simpler. The complication comes in with cross-platform applications.
I disagree. I'm still a fairly new developer and I've tried developing both native and web apps. I found that there are thousands of great well documented frameworks that make developing web high performance web apps easy. Meteorjs for example took me about a weekend to learn, has a huge community with lots of prebuilt packages, and countless tutorials that make implementing smooth animation incredibly easy. Before Meteorjs I used Angularjs and found mostly the same thing. I'm sure it's similar with React or even just standalone Javascript Html and CSS3.
Re:Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat
by mattdeboard on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @06:43PM
(#9614936)
> I found that there are thousands of great well documented frameworks
thousands, absolutely. great and/or well-documented? Unlikely
Browser based applications are much easier to distribute and adds a security layer, so that you do not have to worry as much about trojan/viruses, compared to installing executables from cr4cksnh4cks.com
The browser is the perfect container. And it also helps a bit that the API's are super easy to work with. Making even the novice programmer productive and able to create powerful applications.
One reason why native is bigger on the smart-phone market is that Google, Apple and Microsoft want to completely control their ecosystem and lock people in. What I can not understand though, is why Google does it, as the majority of their income still comes from the word wide web. They have however made major advances on that front lately, to there is still hope.
As the virtualization technology advances, the gap between running on bare metal and in a container continuously decreases. So there will be little incentive running native/bare metal in the future.
We have a long way to go though. If you want to build something that make full use of the hardware, you still should go native. But I hope that changes in the future.