“As products shift from the documents side of the spectrum to the applications side, however, implementing progressive enhancement gets harder. In fact, it might become entirely meaningless or impossible. How would you gracefully degrade an online image editor, for example? How would an image editor work on feature handsets without graphical displays? What content would you actually fall back to displaying?”

“Applications are not content-based; they are behavior-based. Gracefully degrading to a simpler representation of whatever content an application might have does not always make sense. Applications are often made up entirely of behaviors that let users create content. Consider the image editor again: it doesn’t have any content itself, but it enables users to create content.”

Link: Mobile Considerations in User Experience Design: ‘Web or Native?’ (smashingmagazine.com)