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Native app developers: what are your reasons for preferring to develop native over Web apps?
[My initial list:]
DRM
speed for superhi-perf games
app store placement
source-code secrecy
[list compiled from other people's twitter answers; thanks all!]
pushing native notifications when they're not in the "app" (several people said this)
"JavaScript is yucky". I've also heard "Unity does cross-platform better than HTML5".
Hardware access (camera, GPS, NFC etc) - presumably solved for camera (webRTC) and GPS (Geolocation) ?
monetization. it’s hard to take £1 from someone online (many said this - both getting paid when someone "downloads" or "installs" an app, and also in-app payments
"user experience"
UI fluidity — e.g., scroll physics only fairly recently supported properly (wasn't this the Facebook reason, too?)
developer tools
inability to present as installed app on non-iOS mobile platforms; cross browser dev is hard; no App Store discovery; avoid feuds
‘magic folders’ so you can’t store anything on the device (like Dropbox app)
if you want it to work offline [appcache inadequacies], also timely and concurrent audio.
place on someone’s home screen (possible with web but less intuitive)
Access to all the native device and services APIs of the platform is probably a big one. Probably ability to use native widgets too
@bytasv
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bytasv commented Apr 13, 2013

source-code secrecy - I really disagree with this one, if you compile your code, allow to download and install it on your own device it's still vulnerable to disassembling so in any case if you have some business logic that is sensitive NEVER put it on a client anyways. Anything else but business logic is just not worth keeping as a secret IMO

@jurajantas
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@bytasv source-code secrecy, there is big difference when you are looking on source code and compiled dissassembed code (assembler in most cases). It is very easy to modify java script. it is not so easy to do the same with assember.

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