It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.
Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.
It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.
For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.
Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.
Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.
But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.
Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.
I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)
Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.
I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).
Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.