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A single native app will “beat” a single website every time …but an app store pales when compared to the incredible reach and scope of the entire World Wide Web.

That is the great thing about web technology. It isn’t clean or well designed by a long shot — but it is extensible and it can learn from many products built with it. This is how we got the History API, this is how we got Web Sockets and many other APIs that offer a handle on very common web functionality, even if we replace them. If we do everything client-side we do not only need to deliver innovative, new interfaces. We also need to replicate the already existing functionality the web gives us. A web site that takes too long makes the browser show a message that the site is not available and the user can re-try. When the site loads, I see a spinner. Every time we replace this with a client-side call, we need to do a lot of UX work to give the user exactly the same functionality.