Homescreen Webapps

About a year ago, I wrote a little note explaining why—in my opinion—web applications were still way behind native apps. I read it again today and I'm a bit sad to observe not much has changed since then. iOS 6 brings a few nice things but overall, the situation is pretty much the same.

I took my current home screen as an example. How many apps would I be able to recreate today targetting only the latest version of Mobile Safari and without sacrificing any feature? Spoiler: none.

• Clock: Forget the most useful feature: alarm.
• Calendar: Event alerts can't be implemented.
• Photos: Can't store 1000 photos and videos in cache.
• Camera: Well, no.
• Settings: You can't modify any iOS settings, obviously.
• Reminders: You can't set actual reminders.
• Reeder: You can't share an article by Message.
• Tweetbot: No push notifications.
• Phone / Messages / Safari: Not sure I need to explain.
• Mail: Banner and icon badge notifications can't be implemented.

There are obviously way more things that couldn't be implemented today but I just wanted to highlight one feature from each of those apps I'd really miss.

I'm not even talking about very serious issues like performance (good luck replicating Reeder and Tweetbot) or offline restrictions, just replicating the actual features is far from being possible today.

This quick (and probably partially inaccurate) analysis consolidates my opinion from last year: mobile webapps aren't a decent choice if you're serious about software and user experience.