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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

> But I'd love a native client for Gmail even more. Email clients have been out for a long time.

> Imagine Flickr on a tablet. Swiping, pinching, tapping. All of which can be accomplished without going native. These are accessible by normal web pages using JavaScript.

> Try spending 30 minutes going through newsfeeds and photo albums without having the javascript go unresponsive. Facebook has native apps already, and they aren't any better. You can't find new messages, notifications not appearing properly are some of the problems I face. And you don't have to wait 30 minutes to have these problems. They appear before opening the app!

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> Email clients have been out for a long time

On the desktop, yes. Why? Because all the innovation in organizing, displaying, and managing email was focuses on webmail. Not because it was a better platform, but because it was incredibly easy to deploy and cheaper to develop.

Where is the email client back? On the phone. People want access to their email if they don't have an internet connection. Used to be the same on the desktop when being online meant you were tying up a phone line at a per minute cost. Your desktop is always online now, so it's not an issue.

But I still believe we will see a return to native email clients because of the integration possible with other client software and services. We already see it on tablets and phones.

> Where is the email client back? On the phone. People want access to their email if they don't have an internet connection.

Can still be accomplished without being native.

Listen, it's clear we aren't going to agree. But the simple fact is, unless things change, going the JS and HTML route for apps is best for the vast majority of applications people use on a daily basis. This is demonstrated by the fact that they are using these apps on a daily basis.

> This is demonstrated by the fact that they are using these apps on a daily basis

That's not true. People are using apps on their phones, not webapps. They're using apps on their TVs and tablets, not webapps. And people are actually paying for native apps, something no one is doing for webapps.

Seriously, you don't see any parallels between now and the late 90s? You don't think it's going to get drastically cheaper to produce native apps in the next couple years? The same thing happened in web development, a combination of better dev tools, more code libraries/frameworks, and more labor supply will drive costs down.

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