I think it's getting better. Tablet-like devices are still a relatively new platform, and improvements like what you're asking for are inevitable as more hackers gain expertise in the platform and all its nooks and crannies.<p>Browsers in particular improve by necessity, because of the issues with security. In particular with mobile devices! And of course if the code isn't allowed to become stagnant--if it's always being changed in some way--other improvements will likely show up too. Of course, we can speed up the process of making a better browser. Firefox for Android is a thing, albeit one I haven't personally tried yet; maybe it does a better job with things like web forms (which are a pain to fill out on phones).<p>The browser is only part of the problem, though. The fact that web site maintainers would rather have you download an app client than let you just work off their site (on a young platform they aren't really familiar with yet, remember) is nothing new. I think it often makes things easier on them, programming-wise. But the problem becomes that they compete for space on users' phones. I don't keep a lot of apps on my phone, and I don't like downloading new ones for services I'm ambivalent about or won't use often.<p>It's worth remembering what happened to email clients. Most people don't use them any more on their laptops; they use Gmail, which is online. Yet on phones, we're back to using email clients (probably because the browsers are pretty awful). The space problem will, I think, help cause demand for better browsers, and then website apps will shift back online.<p>Also, there's this. <a href="https://xkcd.com/1174/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1174/</a><p>There are certain apps that should be apps, though. Some apps can be web sites, and that'd be a good thing. Other apps--the ones that are useful when you're not connected to the Internet (which is infrequent but happens)--should stay apps. It's nice to be able to disconnect the Wi-Fi and still play Tetris.<p>I wouldn't mind a BuzzFeed app if it downloaded and compressed certain articles based on filters I defined, and let me access them offline to kill time in a doctor's office or whatever (this is probably way beyond the BuzzFeed folks, though--just an example). I wouldn't mind a HN app that downloaded the top stories as cached/compressed versions, either. Again, this would be the shape of an email client, but convenient time-killers always have a market.<p>This might be a good startup idea if anyone wants to take a crack at it: a content aggregator that stores articles (based on user-defined filters) from certain sites, as compressed archives on your phone. I'd do it myself, but I'm already working on something!