I think this argument, ad hominem aside, loses a bit of validity with every subsequent smartphone/tablet generation. Every advance in CPUs and JavaScript interpreters blurs the line more if we're looking at a hybrid app developed by a competent team.

As to where I'm coming from in this argument, yes, I currently develop mobile apps using web technologies. [1]

And yes, I completely agree that the majority of web view/hybrid apps I've encountered have had poor user experiences. But the field of hybrid apps is new and everyone can recall the poor user experiences of desktop web apps in their nascent era.

As with the age of MapQuest, the sample size of hybrid apps is still small and thus well-designed and well-coded apps are scarce. Aesthetics give probably the biggest impression of mobile software quality, and you can either choose to stick to stock SDK UI, or implement your own visual language. The former is safe and is the default for native development. Hybrid apps almost always fail when trying to mimic it completely and users are (at least subconsciously) repelled by the uncanny valley these apps may land in. The latter option of introducing a unique UI is exceedingly difficult to pull off, hybrid or native, but is a route of convenience for hybrid developers, but again, they usually fail to create something a user can feel comfortable with.

In short, if you're serious about your app's reception, it is more difficult to pull off the user experience using web technologies, contrary to the article's assertion. Hybrid app developers cannot rely on native UI elements and this is why they tend to be received so poorly.

So why have I chosen the hybrid approach? Mainly because I'm a futurist and I see the immense value in having an open lingua franca for app development over fractured proprietary environments. The cross platform benefits appeal to me less, and at the time of this writing, I consider iOS to be ahead of the other platforms in fidelity of rendering web content (Android 4 is catching up). I fully admit this benefit is half-baked at the moment, but I don't need any pundit predictions to know it will improve by bounds in the next few years.

JS isn't a silver bullet, but it's undeniably exploding at the moment, especially in terms of flexibility (browser, server, mobile). You could invest your time in mastering a proprietary platform's SDK, but besides only focusing on non-portable knowledge, you could also find yourself with a dying marketshare for your chosen platform. I definitely don't mean to discredit native languages by any means, I just want to convey how I came to conclude that hybrid is a safe investment in mastering. Many apps, whether simple CRUD apps, or thin front ends for REST APIs, have no specific need for native code. Even Microsoft --seen among the symbols of proprietary control -- are embracing the HTML5 stack for apps. The benefit of being able to reuse the libraries and APIs [2] when bringing an app to another platform shouldn't be underestimated, nor the potential growth of mobile-oriented common knowledge in a common language.

Is it really difficult to believe that in a few years phones will be running WebGL-powered 3D games with advanced shader effects, on par with native games? Not really, considering how rapidly we're approaching that point on the desktop. It's even easier when you consider the hybrid app bottleneck is usually DOM painting, not JS execution, and WebGL would potentially use the mobile device's GPU. This problem is almost solved already with intelligent DOM manipulation and CSS3 transforms, (or potentially other approaches [3]).

Writing a quality hybrid app at the moment is very hard. Web views have less memory available, execution is slower, and simple DOM rendering is expensive and slow unless all optimized properly. Furthermore, aesthetics are harder to pull off when working outside SDK UI sets. But hybrid apps are a relatively new field and have enormous potential. I don't it's very mature yet, but neither was the web itself for a very long time. I think having a common, open set of tools is worth defending from accusations like this one or the red herrings thrown around regarding HTML5's role in the Facebook app. This is definitely the more forward-thinking bet.

[1] - http://chaincalapp.com

[2] - specifically HTML5 device APIs as well as http://phonegap.com

[3] - http://famo.us