There are many types of utility apps (say a unit converter or tip calculator) that would be perfect as a web app.
With support for localstorage and cache manifests, the app can be available offline as well and can even have a nice optimized icon to put on the home screen and a splash screen to show.
The only drawback I currently see is that every time you load the web app it first checks with the server (for changes) before letting you interact with it.
Actually it is. "app-style experience" is the easy part - but there's more examples of bad then good.
The failing is when HTML/JS needs to do 'heavy lifting' that native code does better (such as large memory based tasks, 3d rendering for now, animations, heavy math, or hooking into hardware).
If there are many more examples of bad than good, and for JS apps, this is a dramatic understatement, this is a great pragmatic definition of it not being good for apps.
For example, I've never played a JS/Canvas game for the sake of it being a good game. Has anyone? I see a lot of frameworks, and a lot of demos to advocate for the platform, but no good games. Why is this? At this point, the novelty of the platform is no longer an excuse. It has been a forum darling for several years now.
Sadly this is true. Canvas is still very much in its infancy. I see two main issues with Canvas for games right now.
First, canvas really needs to be hardware accelerated (someone already does this, Microsoft?). Having a few objects move around should barely take any CPU but with Canvas today it can be anywhere from 10%-20%.
Second, their needs to be game engines/abstractions on top of Canvas. Most developers don't want to have to write there own render/clear loop with all the utility functions to do movement, render shapes, texture elements, and keep object state. I know their are a few out there now but they are no where near the quality needed. This second step will not happen until my first point (HW acceleration) is in place.
Writing you a snarky reply about your misuse of "their" and "there" and erasing it was somewhat cathartic. But not enough, so I had to write this. Please make sure that you can use some of the most basic building blocks of your native language.
That would be good if it were true. It's not.