>The drumbeat for web apps is "we can be just as good as native apps!" which is where the focus belongs IMHO. If it's true without excessive download baggage, then there are plenty of reasons to prefer web apps, not least privacy. But Google has its sights on that as well, embedding web apps more closely into Android and presumably following usual snooping lines: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/11/google_progressive_web_apps/

From technological POV almost everything could be run in compiled Javascript, as the performance is much closer to C++ than most other dynamic languages. The starting benefit - security - is diminished the more access a web application can depend on on the device. The other (for me game changing) diference is the ability to cache lookups, temporary work and similar stuff locally: here Oracle and MS torpedoing WebSQL set back the clock almost ten years :-((