You're not the only person to give me that feedback. :) Check out my other reply as well.

I agree it's possible to make things that feel good, it's just very, very hard, and it's certainly not the default.

You're absolutely right that it is possible to get close. I think my main point here, (though I probably didn't cover this well enough and I was being somewhat hyperbolic, I guess), was that 'damn close' is unfortunately not the default on web, and it's actually really, really hard to get there.

Sorry for coming across as a sales person. Someone tweeted about a previous presentation of mine in the past asking "who the hell is this marketing guy they had do this talk". I assure you I'm not in either marketing, or sales, I just get really excited sometimes.

I thought the talk had a nice balance of pitching the idea of native React and the technical ideas behind it.

This is absolutely a great point, and honestly, I used this exact argument early on in the development of React Native to convince folks that cared a ton about craft and were super worried about performance, that it's more important to make sure you have a reliable application that adds value to peoples' lives, before you even earn the right to start thinking about craft.

My phrasing was somewhat hyperbolic, but I basically said: "Do you honestly think that a person, in the middle of a natural disaster, trying to determine whether or not their family and friends are okay, gives a sh about 60fps animations?"

The real value of React Native is that it allows engineers who know React (and React is really, really easy to learn btw), to build great feeling applications without putting in a ton of effort. Sure, it's possible to get close enough on web, but it's really, really hard to do so.

One of the things we tout in product infrastructure at Facebook is that when building frameworks, you need to enable engineers to fall into the "pit of success". The asynchronous nature of this implementation allows application logic to be run off the main thread by default, which we think is a huge advantage over a traditional web model.

The best part of React Native, if it can deliver on its promises, is that it will provide web developers with a toolset they can use that will satisfy customers or product managers who demand perfect native experiences (whether or not it makes business sense to demand it).

I think the poor reviews of Facebook's HTML5 mobile app shook the company to the core and they swung a bit far in the other direction, abandoning the possibility that the web will ever be mobile ready. I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle; no, you can't get native performance from the web, but you can get close. And every year it gets a little closer because phones are getting ridiculously powerful.

All this said, I think Facebook's approach to the platform fragmentation problem is clever and worth checking out, but I'd still bet on HTML5 over the long term.