>>>OS are no longer in the battlefield
>
>So how come Android's winning? ;-)

Android fought the mobile OS battle quite successfully -- for the sake of Chrome.
This war is also over

>I keep telling people to look at the huge companies who made their fortunes via the browser. Amazon, Priceline, eBay spring to mind. Having succeeded hugely on the desktop browser, in the mobile device age every single one of them now encourages users to install an app to improve user experience.

>Certainly I agree that browser apps come close and are preferable to writing for multiple platforms- and your product is fantastic in encapsulating lots of complexity and allowing cross-platform continued use of valuable development. But in 2015 we had to abandon a web app that could not mimic the multi-form customizable GUI of one of our old Windows apps. The issue was that only IE still allowed browser windows to communicate in the way we needed and MS might decide it's a hack attack vector and close it at any moment, leaving customers with an unusable irreparable product. I realize this is anecdote, but it's important that browsers keep changing (breaking) things while OS have to maintain backward compatibility.

what is sure is that users prefer web apps, even slower, clumsier and with perhaps less features
another sure fact is that 2.5% of the users renew each year -- 40% over the 16 last years -- these new comers grew up with the web