@coldkennels won't disagree with you here. There's tech to make web apps usable offline but it's complicated, hard to test, and flaky. The native mobile frameworks also have some UI interactions that are hard to replicate and maintain. Many of my native apps require an internet connection, though. I wish they didn't.

@analog_cafe I do some work for a client who buys into every single bit of business tech possible - Google Cloud, Monday.com, Canva, etc.

None of them run as quickly or efficiently as basic .rtfs, emails, and so on. Even Photoshop is faster and smoother than Canva, for god's sake - and new versions of Photoshop aren't exactly efficient!

There's been such a push towards "the cloud", AI integration, beautiful UX, and all this fancy tech bro bullshit, but actual *performance* has really suffered.

@analog_cafe I think another part of my concern is that a lot of things that are being presented as a good idea (like web apps) end up benefitting companies more than the end user.

Take, for instance, the rhetoric around Apple restricting what websites can do on iOS; this is very much a Good Thing. I bought into iOS precisely because I don't want random websites having access to the operating system, and it's no surprise companies like Google are criticising Apple for this position.

@coldkennels In some cases, yes. I benefit from saving a lot of time building a single app for the open web rather than dealing with multiple languages, frameworks, and walled gardens within native app stores. In some cases, this may be detrimental to usability.

But web apps can also be easier to secure (they show requests and are easy to sandbox; native apps do almost anything on your machine opaquely), they don't need gigabytes of space, and they are theoretically compatible with all devices.