zlacker

As a mobile dev who’s done a little web work, my experience has been the opposite. If you’re writing your apps with native OS SDKs and mostly stock widgets (don’t go reinventing wheels for the sake of branding), maintenance generally isn’t too bad.

Web app projects on the other hand always feel some degree of held together by bubblegum and duct tape. Do so much as breathe wrong and they fall apart (which is part of why the industry has become docker-centric). None of the old web projects I have laying around are trivial to get into good enough shape to develop on again, whereas I can pick up and old iOS app that hasn’t been touched in a decade and getting it running in an afternoon.

I will say however that there’s a class of poorly built cross platform mobile app that I’ve come to abhor, because as you say they’re brittle and break easily on top of generally being unpleasant to use.