Drew Crawford wrote a very long and well-cited article about why mobile web apps are slow.
Now I am going to warn you–this is a very freaking long article, weighing in at very nearly 10k words. That is by design. I have recently come out in favor of articles that are good over articles that are popular. This is my attempt at the former, and my attempt to practice what I have previously preached: that we should incentivize good, evidence-based, interesting discussion and discourage writing witty comments.
The article primarily discusses JavaScript performance. After reading Drew’s article, you’ll understand why JS usage on mobile has to be relatively light compared to what you can get away with on desktop.
I’d love to see more of this good discussion on non-JavaScript impediments to creating good mobile web apps.