Am I the only one getting fed up with these stupid "religious" wars in much of the IT world?<p>There are many valid cases where native is the better approach and others where web-app is best ! Any decent developer will do their homework and select appropriately.<p>BTW - many of the 'problems' high-lighted on the graph apply to both Native and Web-apps and there are some additional ones with Web-apps but I can't be bothered to spell them out. Bah !!
Even this highly simplified view changes once you have the app installed. With a native app, you have an icon right there on the user's home screen. The web app would require more typing and clicking.
A lie by omission. They forgot to warn (following their warnings upside down):<p>1. Website can be malicious, too. Phishing, clickjacking, XSRFs, browser exploits - there's a lot of nonpleasant stuff on the web.<p>2. Websites can't manage memory and other resources at all. Sure, you, for example, can try to measure performance and disable UI effects, but that's another story.<p>3. In a same way, users must have enough of free space where browser's application cache is kept, too. Or you'll strain network re-downloading same data over and over again. This is especially annoying for roaming and other areas with high $/MiB cost or countryside with slow GPRS connectivity.<p>4. Website can fail, too. And if this is not some user-local network problems, this is more disasterous than a crash of a single copy of app on someone's device - your "webapp" works for noone at that time.<p>5. And, obviously, in a same way as removing the app, users could delete the bookmark for your service.
And of course, this whole thing ignores an entirely different entry point "Discover new app". It assumes you are specifically searching for the app in question. What the app store and it's ilk offer is exposure. Angry Birds has been near the top of the top 25 on the app store since launch, and that alone drives continuous sales.<p>If you're an incredibly well-selling web app, you STILL have to market and spend and shout to get yourself known. No matter how well you're doing, your word of mouth still probably doesn't beat Apple's Top 25 board.
HTML5 support for things like geolocation / camera usage is inconsistent across models and generally brittle. The upside is that mobile web is really low friction and allows for instant deployment, but there's functionality and no good management system like the home screen.<p>I've used the Quora web app occasionally. But if I had actually had a Quora app on my home screen, I'd use it far more frequently.
Oh man, they should really tell Instagram / Angry Birds that their software will work as a webpage and that the user experience on a mobile browser will be that much better.
The only valid negative point I see here is "update app", which is really the web-as-deployment-platform's killer feature from a user's perspective. I do hate having to update 20+ apps on a regular basis, it should just be on-demand.
If you try to view the post in a mobile browser, you get:<p>"Article not found"<p>Or at least, I am, on my iPhone right now.<p>There's definitely a touch of irony there.