You don't always know. Instagram uses webviews everywhere, I'd bet 99% of people would never guess that. I read somewhere that even the iOS messages app uses webviews, though I haven't found a citation for it.

It used to, but no longer on iOS. It is a `UICollectionView`. On OS X, it may still be a web view, but I am not sure.

>You know. You always know. Do you not know Atom is web based?

That's a bad example. There are apps where you absolutely not know. It's not even a "subjective issue".

As long as you have either

a) wrapped native widgets with the same look and behavior as native (or a fully skinned app vs a fully skinned native app)

b) response times below some objective, determined by human physiology, threshold

Then it doesn't matter if it's a higher level framework doing some wrapping, you don't know it at all.

Have you used Visual Studio Code? It's also web based, and 100x smoother than Atom. Some applications are just slow.

It's completely true that "you always know" at some level when you're dealing with a web-based "native-look" mobile app. That's why facebook ditched their effort to build their mobile apps in HTML5 a few years ago. That's why they built React Native, which, many people seem to fail to grasp, is not a web based stack. Javascript is not what's doing the hard work in a React Native app -- you can view it as a native set of UI components which are merely assembled and controlled by javascript. This is the point.

well, I've had that feeling with something is not right on native apps. Anyway you keep saying you, do you mean you or do you mean me? Because if you mean me the problem is I think I don't necessarily notice all the time, or I notice other problems. I'm guessing it's the same for other people.

Eh, Slack works pretty well, and I don't know if I would have known. It may depend on the app function/___domain, a chat app is maybe one you expect to look like 'the web' in the first place. Instagram too maybe, maybe apps with network connectivity/communication as their core will deal better with being implemented on web-tech based platforms.

There are two non-native apps I use frequently on OS X, which are both rather jarring and tawdry in their deviations from the platform norms.

Slack is the second-worst offender. It feels less native than many websites do.

The other is Rubymine, which on Mac now includes its own embedded Java runtime. It's significantly worse, but they are neighbors on the spectrum. Slack suffers less because it's mostly just chat, which can be done even in a Terminal window (e.g., IRC) without suffering that badly. But when you try to do anything in Slack other than just chat, the non-native kludge factor quickly becomes obvious and irritating.