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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Where did he say that? I listened to it yesterday and AFAIK he only said "I don't know where the line between native vs web will end up in the future" (now that we can generate native apps easier)

Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.

Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.

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The issue with native apps is that you have to convince people to install them. If I had one app for each tab I open in my browser my phone would be a mess and out of free space. Then you slow down the delivery of features and bug fixes because you have to go through the app stores. You can't deploy something every day or more often.

So even if we can generate an app easily now, is that a wise choice for every business?

Like everything, depends on the usecase. An email desktop app seems to be a valid one. A standard earlystage B2B SaaS Rails web app? Not so much.

Same with server side rust. A high volume transactional backend email service makes sense there. The base layer of a CRM managing a lot of business logic?

Life will go on much the same. We just have more options to say yes to 'native' with LLMs, we can experiment more with ideal scenarios rather than a religious adherence to cross platform or single-framework merely for team DX simplicity.

If the apps were actually good, you'd install them. A lot of the apps on F-Droid are pretty lightweight, and a phone's security model makes it much safer than installing apps on Windows.

The web makes apps worse by forcing a fairly strict sandbox, even as Google keeps trying to loosen it. Think of a messaging app that hides in your notification tray, that's a trivial UX thing that's impossible on the web.

When I started in computing there was no Web, there was enough space to install the applications that actually mattered, and even better, developers actually had to take hardware constraints into account.

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