Native or web? Feel the difference.

The same short journey, built twice: once native, once as web pages inside a native app. Try both, then decide.

The question we keep getting asked

In experience design, it comes up on almost every project. Which gives people the better experience?

A native app

Built with the phone's own tools. Every screen, gesture and animation comes from the operating system.

Web inside a native app

An app from the App Store whose screens are web pages. One code base for every platform, updated without app review.

Or, more bluntly: is web good enough? A plain website is part of the story too, but it's a side note here. More on that below.

Side by side, a pixel is a pixel.

The usual answer is a slide deck with a comparison table. The trouble is that on a slide, both look the same. Two static designs side by side can be identical.

The differences show up when you use it. So instead of telling you, Side by Side lets you try it.

Where the differences are

How it feels

The part a screenshot can't show.

Moving between screens: How a new screen slides in. Whether swiping back follows your finger. Whether there's a blank flash while the next page loads.
How things move: Springy cards you can fling away, a picture that grows into the next screen. Web animation has come a long way, so this gap is smaller than it was.
What you feel: The small taps you feel through the glass when you pick something. Web content can't do this on its own.
Typing: How the keyboard appears, and whether the screen makes room for it.
Your settings: Larger text, VoiceOver, Reduce Motion, Dark Mode. Native picks these up almost for free. Web has to be built carefully to respect them.

What it can do

Some phone features are only open to native code: Siri, widgets, receiving a share from another app, scanning, background location and health data.

A web app inside a native app can reach most of them, but only by writing that part in native code and passing messages between the web page and the app.

At that point you're building and maintaining two things, which is the cost web was meant to save.

Try it before you read on

You do the same four-step journey twice. You're not told which is native. Then you tell us which you preferred, and why. It takes about five minutes on an iPhone.

TestFlight link coming soon

The differences, side by side

What each approach can do on iPhone today. Checked against iOS 27, November 2026.

Yes: Works well, out of the box.
With native code: Works, but only if engineers build that part natively. At that point it isn't just web any more: it's a second code base to maintain.
Partly: Works, with compromises you can feel.
No: Not possible.

What "with native code" means

An app made of web pages has two layers: a native frame (the bar at the top, the back button) and web pages inside it. The web pages can't reach the phone's hardware or system features on their own.

Say you want a small haptic tap when someone picks a card. The message has to travel like this:

Web pageNotices the tap and says "they picked a card".
BridgePasses that message out of the web page to the native frame.
Native codeWritten in Swift for iPhone, and again in Kotlin for Android.
The phonePlays the tap.

Engineers build and test every part of that chain, for each feature, on each platform. Some features, like widgets and Siri, skip the web page altogether: they're fully native pieces that sit alongside it.

So every "With native code" in the table chips away at the main reason for choosing web: one code base.

What a native app, web in a native app and a plain website can each do on iPhone
Feature	Native	Web in a native app	Plain website
Feel
Animated transitions between screens	Yes	Yes	Yes
Swipe back that follows your finger	Yes	Partly	Partly
Haptics Taps you feel	Yes	With native code	No
Press-and-hold menus with a preview	Yes	With native code	No
Camera, photos and voice
Pick or take a photo, attach a file	Yes	Yes	Yes
Browse the whole photo library	Yes	With native code	No
Scan a document Finds the edges, flattens the page	Yes	With native code	Partly
Read barcodes or text through the camera	Yes	With native code	Partly
Speech to text	Yes	With native code	Partly
Siri and Shortcuts	Yes	With native code	No
Location
Your location while you use it	Yes	Yes	Yes
Location in the background Alerts when you arrive somewhere	Yes	With native code	No
Other apps and the system
Share something to another app	Yes	Yes	Yes
Receive a share from another app	Yes	With native code	No
Widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island	Yes	With native code	No
Push notifications Plain website: only once added to the Home Screen	Yes	With native code	Partly
Health data	Yes	With native code	No
NFC and Bluetooth	Yes	With native code	No
On-device AI	Yes	With native code	No
Where web does well
Face ID sign-in with passkeys	Yes	Yes	Yes
Apple Pay	Yes	Yes	Yes
Works offline	Yes	Partly	Yes
Ship an update without app review	No	Yes	Yes

Sources

WebKit features in Safari 27
WebKit features in Safari 18.2 (transitions between pages)
Apple Foundation Models

How this was made

I'm a designer, not a front-end developer. I built both versions with Claude, an AI coding assistant.

I've tried to make the web version as good as web reasonably can be. This isn't meant to be a straw man. If you think you can build a web version that feels the same, or close enough, I'd love to see it.

Get in touch