Yes, the night side uses a combination of infra-red imagery with a static image of the Earth at night. Without that image all the landmass and cities would disappear into black, so it helps give the IR imagery context. And it looks nice. It’s a common technique called GeoColor.
High resolution will be older imagery. You won’t be able to see your house in near real time unless you pay to task a satellite from a commercial provider like Planet Labs.
I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply want to see their house from space. Which is understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.
Some details: It combines near real-time images from multiple geostationary satellites, updated every 10 minutes (with a delay of ~30 minutes). NASA GOES satellite for the Americas, Japan's Himawari-8 for Asia and Meteosat in Europe/Africa. Zoomable up to 500m per pixel. Beyond that it uses historical imagery from Microsoft and Esri.
There's no reason why native apps and the mobile web can't peacefully coexist and thrive. There isn't going to be a "winner." It's not a zero-sum game. The future will be more of what we have today: more apps, more websites, more devices. But nothing is going to die, or be killed off by the other.
> All the user needs is an URL. No "downloading", no installation, no special user permissions, no app shops, no gate keepers, no walled gardens...
Exactly. The humble hyperlink is the most amazing thing about the web. It's simple yet devastatingly powerful.
I'm not a snob about the programming languages of the web. I don't care what language I need to learn to create content for the web, or what tools I need to use. The language and the tools will always be a means to an end — that is, the radical ability to provide free and instant access to any content for everyone on the Internet.