Comment by potamic

At what point does it make sense to simply use the web for this? This is what the web was meant for, to enable standardized, dumb clients to consume content from any provider. What we have today is a wonderful architecture and a solid set of standards that is the result of over 20 years of evolution. As a user, there is not much I haven't been able to do on the web, that I do on mobile apps. Why do companies insist on the apps model, even when it causes them so much pain as to reinvent the web? Is the performance or user experience over web really that bad, even in this day and age to warrant shipping a 100MB package to the user? Or are there some nefarious gains or access to privileged information to be had by having your app installed on the user's device that the browser sandbox typically safe guards against?