Web apps are the future, how many more stupid native apps must I install to get basic textual and photo information? The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
You're conflating the web with web apps. Those are two separate things.
If web apps are to be the future, bloating up the browser to the size of an OS to get native-app level functionality sounds like a dystopian future to me. I don't want my browser to access my GPU, I don't want by browser leaking my LAN IP, I don't want my browser communicating with USB devices on my machine, etc, etc...
Also, nobody (yet) has been able to create a GUI/Client App standard for cross-platform delivery that performs well across different hardware architectures and operating systems which are designed and optimized for completely different things. That makes sense because the "one size fits all" way of doing things is terrible for performance among other things.
>The only right answer is universal apps(the web).
The only "right" answer is that we should tolerate specific web apps only when the benefits outweigh the costs.
Native apps will likely always have a place when OS/UI integration are paramount. But web apps will become a lot more prevalent than they have been previous as more and more hooks are exposed to the native core. Which is a good thing for everyone.
I don't really know the best way to delineate what should and shouldn't be a web app, beyond a vague notion that my daily news rotation should be in the browser.
Actually I'd argue the web is great for that too. On Android you can already implement a messaging app, complete with notifications, on the web.
I wish people like my bank used it. I don't want to install their native app because I barely ever use it, but would I like to get urgent notifications from them every now and then? You bet I would.
Just because there's been a lot of progress in making web apps do things that were more natural for native apps, doesn't mean that it's the best way to go about something.
I get the wish for more support for web apps, though. I just switched over from a near 4-year-old phone that was replete with security updates and other un-removable stuff in the storage which prevented me from having a lot of apps installed (especially as so many insist on a large footprint in internal storage), so I increasingly used my web browser to access things. After the switch, though, you can bet I downloaded a bunch of apps I had deleted.
One of the most annoying examples of that for me is accepting a new connection on LinkedIn from my phone. I want to tap on the link in the email and be done. Instead it redirects me to the store, I close it, try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes I give up and do it later.
Another example is Facebook. :)