There’s a lot of reasons to use a app over a browser.
Speed is not one of them.
As a web dev, we can absolutely provide you faster experience. Depending on the service and needs, we can blow any app awaym
But a app can access hardware tools that browsers cannot.
Of course a good website can beat a shit app. But there’s no way that you can build a website that’s faster than a good app.
First of all, because your website has to run on an actual app, called a web browser. Additionally, you can’t magically remove the initial load time to fetch resources from the server. Those resources are already on your phone on the app so it’s instantaneous.
You…realize that when you visit a website more than once the resources are also available on your phone right? Even the most bloated JS monstrosity will have most of its data cached after the first visit and the initial load time will be as good as an installed app after the first visit. You’re not fetching all 200mb of its JavaScript every time you visit the site. Of course, if the site updates its code, you’ll have to re-fetch it, but the same goes for app updates.
Obviously if your app is designed to work offline, a website probably is going to be worse. But that’s a scenario that actually does warrant a standalone app, which does not go for the majority of apps.
Most apps just do CRUD and act as a thin client to fetch data from a server (this includes pretty much all social media apps). There is not going to be a real difference in speed between loading the site in a web browser with cached resources or a fully-fledged app you install, except the app can harvest data from you in ways that can be prevented by a good browser. Actually, a site can be faster in many cases since it leverages libraries and capabilities already built into and loaded by a browser while an app might have to load its own standalone resources. And being able to access the app offline in these instances is worthless because if your connection isn’t good enough to serve the website, it’s not good enough to use the app either.
If it’s a CRUD app and slower than the network, it is a dogshit app. Both the app and the webpage should be exactly as fast, since it should be waiting for the network for most of the time.
The cache is not magic though. It doesn’t work for the first visit, and it doesn’t last forever. Some clients might not even use a cache. I don’t know if this is the case, but if the cache is validated to be recent (an HTTP HEAD request or whatever) that’s still a round trip to the server.
