My experience might be the minority, but I have found that 95% of the time, when an app is available on both web and native mobile, the native mobile version is significantly better - usually not because it's a fantastic app or has more features, but rather because the web version is more buggy/slow/confusing.

Whether I prefer an app to be web or native is purely based on the use case (I probably would choose native for a dozen use cases and web for the remaining one million use cases), but that's orthogonal to the fact of which one is actually better.

Edit: And to be clear, I'm not referring to cases where the web app is purposefully restricted or injected with dark patterns to drive users to native. Even if you ignore those cases, this pattern still stands in my experience. Though, that doesn't mean there is no indirect quality bias, e.g. more money spent on the native devs than the web devs.

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Vachyas 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yea, webapps (even PWAs) still can't compete with native apps when it comes to responsiveness, but I still don't know why. I've yet to see even a demo PWA that passes the "native turing test" where I can't tell whether it's a native app or not.

Even native apps that were built with cross-platform frameworks feel a bit "off" sometimes.

	▲	Zopieux 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Can't relate. Except for Google Maps and Docs, I can't think of a native app that couldn't be a WebView. Hell, most of them are anyway! The worst kind is French banking apps or IBKR app: many features are native, but then because of some weird tech debt or incompetent tech leadership, they'll sometimes show you web pages in a shitty, slow, completely different UI-wise built-in WebView for mundane tasks like downloading a PDF statement.
	▲	davebren 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		WASM apps get around this for the most part but there's so many more layers between the app and the hardware for web apps compared to native, plus it's javascript. And a lot of the cross-platform frameworks use a javascript bridge so that becomes the bottleneck. Kotlin/Compose multiplatform is fast on everything.
	▲	bguebert 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I feel like its because other than the user, the people involved have a benefit to running native instead of as a webapp. The phone OS companies get their percent of apps developed in their stores and the app developers get better access to your data to resell. Apple in particular has been really hostile to webapps.

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stvltvs 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whether or not the UX is better, from a security standpoint I choose the web version because of browser sandboxing unless I'm forced to use the app. If I'm forced to use the app, I probably choose not to use the service.

	▲	armadyl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> from a security standpoint Ironically applications are far more secure running in the OS sandbox than the browser if you're on Android or iOS.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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senordevnyc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Often it's because the teams of product managers, designers, and native mobile engineers in those companies are fully focused on the same mobile experience, while the web team has a split focus, and tends to be more focused on desktop web (where they inevitably do their primary testing and QA) than mobile web.

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IshKebab 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've found that the apps often just entirely miss out features that are available in the web versions. That's why I don't have the GitHub app.

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libria 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> when an app is available on both web and native mobile, the native mobile version is significantly better

Did you read the article? One of the author's main points is this is a deliberate result by vendors.