> "If native is so important for regular use services why is there no desktop facebook app?"

I had a longer post written out, but it felt disjoint and fails to address the core point, which is:

Mobile browsers are extremely, absurdly, obscenely bad compared to their desktop counterparts

That's pretty much the only reason apps exist.

I also used the Facebook webapp exclusively for a while - when the "native" app was so bad that it out-sucked the iPhone's craptastic browser (a major feat, if I may so). Since then they've made a lot of improvements and I've gone native again.

To be somewhat simplistic, there isn't a desktop Facebook app, because you'd be hard pressed to beat the quality of experience you get from a desktop browser in the first place, especially when we're talking strictly about the mouse+keyboard world.

If mobile browsers ever stopped sucking, the app market would shrink to a tiny fraction of its current size overnight.

To be more specific, there are a bunch of problems:

- Touch detection is mediocre compared to native. A mouse click is a pretty binary situation and easy to judge - a finger is harder and involves more soft factors. Currently both the state of the art iOS and Android browsers will routinely miss clicks. The Surface browser stands out as particularly bad.

To extend this a bit: if you find yourself building even relatively complex native mobile UIs you'll inevitably start handling some low-level touch events yourself. The human finger is an imprecise instrument and once you go beyond the "touch this big button, then touch that big button" UI you will have to do some work to help your users do what they intended. This level of control is currently unavailable to websites, though this may exist in the future (I sure as hell hope it does).

- Caching behavior is plain awful. We have tabbed browsing, but we don't actually have tabbed browsing. On my PC I have an abundance of HDD and RAM, I have dozens of tabs open and I can return to any of them instantaneously - this is a huge part of the usefulness of the web. On mobile I can pop over just a couple more tabs and it's already dumping my cache, and returning to a previous tab means a complete reload of everything, across the network. Switching tabs on a mobile browser is frequently an awful experience - one much, much worse than the counterpart of switching apps.

Furthermore, mobile users use apps like they use tabs on desktop: many at once, with the expectation of seamless, instant resumes when switching. This mode of usage is completely absent on any phone browser available now, though the marketing material may insist otherwise.

- Lack of platform-specific interactions. There is, practically speaking, only one interaction available to mobile apps: the click/tap. A huge part of why smartphones even took off was the extended way in which you can interact with your device - swipes, pinches, rotates, in addition to "clicks". You "can" implement these in webapps, but the performance is almost universally atrocious (see: Google Maps mobile web) and unreliable. Web apps on mobiles stick out like sore thumbs because they almost always mean a substantial narrowing of interactivity in a way that's very user-visible.

So yeah, tl;dr: mobile-native exists because mobile-web is a pale, pasty shadow of desktop-web.