More comment on the HTML5 vrs Native "argument".
Today, when someone decides to build a mobile app from HTML, it’s primarily a developer-focused decision and not a user-focused decision. What I mean by that is that often times HTML makes it easier/faster/cheaper for someone to deploy a mobile app. Maybe they have a bunch of web developers and want to quickly crank out an app. Maybe they want to target multiple devices and they see HTML as a way to reuse code. Those aren’t bad reasons to chose HTML5 necessarily, but they do drastically change the goals of a project from “make this as awesome as possible” to “make this as good as we can with our constraints”.
And from Mr Like himself:
That meant Zuck owning up to drinking the mobile web Kool-Aid too soon. “The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.” While building native apps that were bacially just a wrapper for the mobile web standard let it experiment quickly, it made the apps run way too slow. “We burnt two years.”
I think that using the mobile web - especially with things like Responsive Design - is the right choice in a lot of cases, but for anything that the user interacts with, rather than just consuming, "going native" is really the only viable option.
And, of course, if you want to go cross-platform and native, and reuse as much of your code as possible... well, there is only one tool set that lets you do that :)
