There seems to be a continual march towards everything being a webapp but I’m not on board. As far as possible I try to use native apps to whichever platform I’m on and here’s why.

Quality is generally higher

This isn’t really directly an issue on being native or not; there are some great quality web apps, like Fastmail. However, they are very much the exception that proves the rule. For most people offering just a webapp experience then it often means they’re doing it that way to save money. That’s not a great motivator for providing a great app experience.

I can be in control of upgrades

The inevitability with webapps is that they undergo continual evolution. This will inevitably break some element of my workflow. They may be chasing a new product segment or just have a new product manager that wants to redesign and make everything slower (looking at you here Gmail). If I’m happy with the feature set on a native app I can just stick with the version I’ve got and upgrade when I’m ready, although this may be API compatibility dependent in some cases.

Designed for power users

You only need to look at the difference between MS Office webapps and the native equivalents to understand how productivity is generally a second class citizen in the webapps. Sure you can get quick things done, but if you’re trying to create a complicated powerpoint presentation you’re going to be working much slower in the webapp. The app is a toy. Again, there’s an exception that proves the rule for Mac users here, and that is Outlook for mac barely functions and the PWA is much more reliable and capable.