Why? How could it possibly be better for memory to rely on a browser runtime in addition to your app's code? Sharing. Single browser process amortizes costs aggressively. Same thing has played out w/ Chrome Custom Tabs: apps that move away from webview win memory back.
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Also, web apps are *structurally* designed to be sipped through a straw. It's a crisis if there's 500K of JS, but 500K of native code is just a tuesday because a-priori distro. The expectations of developers are cultural, and cultures creates tools that match their shared priors
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Native developers share the prior that distribution isn't (usually) a runtime concern. If something is slow about code loading, go look for VM or disk latency effects. Web developers are distribution gated, and their runtime is 100% geared to shrinking resources.
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Web developers *fail* to do a good job a lot of the time because they don't share the native camp's focus on on-device development. But for the subset that do build within those constraints, the platform is surprisingly able.
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I should also say that because of a lack of on-device culture, webdevs also don't tend to know about (or spend much time on) memory, so it can be a considerable problem to remediate if an app, e.g., has a huge JS heap or allocates too many layers via CSS.
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But given this set of tools and priors, I'd rather be trying to serve *all* users with one codebase & learning where hard limits are than try to optimise multiple native apps.
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To be fair, this is getting downvoted because it goes against conventional wisdom and subjective experience while not providing any supporting evidence. I would call this trolling.
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I would call that HN's entire oeuvre.
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To what extent can you count the app as smaller if it needs a browser to run, too? I get that many apps can use the same browser, so that's nice, but what if it's only 1 or 2 apps? Also, are PWAs smaller because they don't have as many features, by design or by browser limit?
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It only takes 2 apps to amortise the cost of the average browser download.
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