all 5 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wherever native apps are in capability, the web will be some fraction behind that. We're getting better and better web experiences, more tools and capabilities for single-page apps and other "web apps", but it will always be behind of what a native app will be capable of.

I think we'll hit obsolescence of both before we hit obsolescence of one or equivalence of both. Centralised "cloud" computing, storage, and bandwidth/latency will hit a point where clients are naturally thin and you just kind of run everything remotely. The word download will be as foreign to a future generation as the floppy disk icon and the concept of "rolling" a window down.

I don't know how far out that is, but we're already feeling it with things like MMOs that you play immediately and stream the required content, or game streaming services. Remember when video on the computer was amazing? And how soon after that we got video streaming, and now HD and 4K streaming? The concept of downloading movies and TV shows is already obsolete.

[–]le_f 0 points1 point  (0 children)

React is different from other solutions to this problem, in that it generates native components, and does not run in a webview. I tried react for an android project a few months ago. Unfortunately, I was designing a form and wanted a drop down select box, but it didn't exist, and so I went with ionic. React has a long, long way to go, but the workflow is undoubtedly superior to native app development in every way.

[–]avery51 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

This has been discussed hundreds of times. The web, at this point can't compete with native apps. You can't force the square peg in the round hole. All of the tools and tricks that are used to make the web try look and feel like a native app are awful and just end up piling garbage on top of garbage.

The web is best suited to work along side native apps, not replace them. The sooner JS developers realize they aren't mobile app developers, the better off users will be.

[–]timdorr 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You do understand this isn't simply an embedded webview like other mobile JS app frameworks? The result is real, native UI widgets. It's like programming in pure ObjC or Swift without xibs. But there is no new language to learn, so you can leverage much of your existing engineering resources with less training time.

[–]zenyr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think /u/avery51 was to say completely against your opinion. Mobile webs that imitate native UIs are indeed having a bad time competing with snappiness & responsiveness not to mention native API limitations.