web apps vs mobile apps

Question

Is there a significant advantage of creating a mobile app as opposed to a web application?

I pose this question from the following perspective, which is biased towards my lack of knowledge of the mobile phone architecture.

1. You can build a web application with pure javascript, css, and html.

2. You don't have to write different code for iOS, Android, etc.

3. The user simply goes to a url, and that's your app, served right there from the server.

   I would like someone to highlight some of the advantages of writing specific code for a mobile web application.

What does a mobile app fundamentally have a significant advantage over a web application?

Answer 1

Mobile apps have some advantages:

• Assets are packaged on the phone - you only need to load data from the server, not your layout.

• Users are familiar with the conventions of their chosen mobile OS,
  which your app will follow.

• Trends show users are spending more time in Apps than web on mobile

• Can work offline (even if limited)

• Mobile apps have access to native features like push notifications,
  GPS, Camera, etc

There are also hybrid apps - which are web apps running in a native container. You may have heard of Cordova, which is a platform for acheiving this. You basically create your app as a web app, and it runs inside a native WebView - with this you can use a javascript API to access some native features, but you don't get many of the other benefits of a native app.