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Comment by jasonpbecker | Hacker News Reader

Just an observation: the native apps that are better are built on massive, proprietary frameworks developed by platform owners. In some ways, most of the web frameworks are trying to be the One True Web Platform Framework that similarly makes it possible for developers to make better web apps the way that say, AppKit or UIKit makes that possible on Apple's platforms.

So I'm left wondering, did the frameworks fail or did the web developer community fail?

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Until or unless something equivalent to those platform frameworks becomes part of the browser, the situation won’t change significantly. The fact is that the current interface between web app and browser, that is, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (and WASM), is highly inadequate for productivity applications.

I think “highly inadequate” is a big exaggeration. As an example, many people are fairly productive on slack. (Arguably more productive than email.) Native slack is nearly equivalent to web. Another example is google sheets or google docs.

I do agree native had some big benefits. Probably the biggest hindrance to web is that you’re basically downloading the binary from the server and then executing it in line. That leads to a ton of performance optimizations (like optimizing bundle size or async loading things) which make things fairly complicated (webpack) and can also lead to UX compromises. None of which is a problem for native apps.

That's 100% fair, but I don't think that's really the argument of GP. The argument is that the interface is inadequate, not that the result itself is.

With enough force you can definitely fit a square object in a round hole. Not saying I totally agree. IMO it heavily depends. I've seen my share of native monstrosities (seen lots of XAML/WPF apps with zero accessibility and very slow, although WPF is lovely from a dev perspective), and "productivity" covers a lot of ground.

The primitives required by slack happen to correlate well with the primitives that the "web" platform provides.

That certainly helps.

The new breed of try-hard build-big "final"-framework would-be's plays against what the web is, trades incrementalism stengths for probably-not-all-that totalization. trying to decide & pick the one true platform, giving up the more malleable low level platform is the problem, is what the closed-world expectations have ruined the web's great prospects with.

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