Interesting that your two examples of "high quality" apps don't have web counterparts. Both Tweetbot and Instagram exist solely as native applications - which means that it makes business sense for them to develop natively.

Companies like OkCupid and LinkedIn, whose apps both rely heavily on web views, need to think about the benefits of using the same code across multiple platforms. I'd tend to argue that both of those apps are pretty well-done. They certainly lack some of the really slick transitions and polish of an app like Tweetbot, but I definitely don't think either one feels cheap.

No offense, but Facebook's webapp is stellar compared to the native app, Instagram can't stop crashing left and right and I don't even follow anyone, Twitter's app has taken it ages to get where it is today.

Oh, I'm fully on-board with the idea that web apps can be a reasonable alternative to native. I spend a huge amount of my time at work building mobile experiences in HTML5, because that approach makes sense for our product. I was just sort of hoping that gfosco would enlighten me as to why PhoneGap is so universally terrible.

I have a hard time believing that. Yeah it may take meg or so extra space, but if you think that is bloated it is time to upgrade that PDP 10 to a phone were it is about a rounding error.

Can you articulate this any more than a really poor analogy that falls flat for more than one reason?

Do you just have a problem with the native components that are all always there versus just the shim pieces you need, etc? Any evidence that that really causes any sort of perceivable issue? It seems like it would all be microscopic compared to... anything else in a real application.