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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

Native-Speed my a. Sorry but people should stop lying about it. Angular is great but it's damn slow no matter what people say about it. And Webapps UIs are never as fast as native UI on mobile. Once these 2 things have been debunked,we can talk honestly about the advantages of using things like Ionic or other solutions.

I personnally look forward to using React Native ,as a Titatinium user, there is no question using native components directly instead of html+CSS in webviews is better, faster and when the UI kit of my mobile is updated , I don't have to restyle all the components to match the current design. If I need a webview,well I have access to the webview anyway.But all the app SHOULDN'T live inside a webview.

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Author of the course here: to users, the performance difference is not noticeable. If you look under the hood, sure, there are absolutely inefficiencies that happen. But a vast majority of the time it has no effect on the user experience, and that has been the dealbreaker with hybrid apps in the past. Browser rendering is now fast enough, and the frontend technologies robust enough, that developing and deploying hybrid apps can often be a much better experience than developing in native.

That said, React native looks awesome and I'm looking forward to using it - but it != death of Ionic/hybrid apps imho.

To users on high-end devices (latest iPhones, high-end Androids), the performance difference is extremely minimal.

The second you go down to the low-end and mid-end devices, it's very obvious that a hybrid app has performance issues.

When we built Songhop (an Ionic powered app) and tested on 4S, the app performance was the same as other apps on the phone. Unless the phone isn't updated to the latest OS version, performance in webview will generally be similar to native apps.

I feel that once a web UI is updating at 60 fps, it's at native speed. While it's true that the native components could theoretically update at 600 fps, the screen doesn't refresh that fast.

In other words, it's possible to make a web UI that is indistinguishable from the native components if styled identically.

One big reason why web apps feel slow is that by default there is a 300ms tap delay, which the browser uses to try and distinguish different types of actions.

Here's an example of a web UI that updates at 60fps: http://petehunt.github.io/react-touch/

That still feels incredibly janky

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