If they have an app they can gather far more personal data from you (and your device) that they can then turn around and sell

So they can make your phone go bingedybeep and show you more adverts, while slurping up any data the browser doesn’t usually let them access.

Ad revenue. It is harder to block ads on mobile than it is on desktop.

Some people are missing the forest for the trees here

Having a businesses app on your phone is better regular advertising than anything they could ever pay for.

They just want an excuse to make you look at their logo and think about their business as regularly as possible

We had a project once that ran completely fine as a website except for the ability to scan bar codes. That one thing forced us to create an app and the rest of the app was just showing the website.

• the free ad space on your home screen. Sure it’s a small ad, but you see it all the time.

• notifications. Even if only a small fraction of users allow them, it’s a lot of free advertising. And yes, you can put notifications on websites, but that’s not as reliable or as expected as native app notifications.

• permissions. The more legitimate apps may provide some sort of additional functionality that their website can’t provide on its own. The shadier ones sell the data they get from the sensors all over your phone.

• data storage. Technically web storage is a thing, but it’s definitely not something you want to hang your whole business on right now.

• integrations. You can integrate, for example, Google Pay/Apple Pay on a website, but it’s more of a hassle. In an app, it’s practically drop-in. Same with the share functionality.

• why not? If you already have a mobile site and can make an app from it reasonably easy, there’s no reason not to. You’ve become multi-channel with no extra work.

There are probably other reasons, but those are the ones that make sense to me, being in the industry.

There’s no one single answer to this. Some have been mentioned in other comments, but it’s a combination of a few different things:

• Control: They have much more control over your experience as a native app than a web app.
• Ad revenue: It’s significantly harder to block ads coming through the built in web views, and/or they can just build them in natively which is even harder.
• Integration: it’s easier to do IAPs or subscriptions through native controls, which means less resistance, which means people are more likely to end up doing it.
• Data: it’s easier to hoover up user data via native APIs than through the browser. There’s way more accessible, especially if you can ask for a bunch of permissions and people don’t notice/care. This makes any user tracking they do way more effective and any data they sell way more valuable.
• Notifications: Recently browsers have started adding support for this but it’s not as effective. Push notifications are a huge boon to user engagement and this is a huge money maker. Having native notifications is a huge sell in this equation.
• Persistence: If you have your app on a user’s phone, it ends up in the list of apps, meaning they pass by it very frequently. It’s basically free advertising and living in their head without them even noticing. This is especially true on iOS where basically all of your apps are in your face all of the time.
• Performance: Native apps run way better and can look way better than web sites. If you just use web views this is mostly moot but still may make a small difference.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a few but you get the idea.

Websites are basically just inferior versions of native apps, and even if you use a hybrid/web view approach, you get many of the benefits and have the option to “upgrade” to a real native app later.

That being said, I fucking hate this shit. I don’t agree that companies should do this, but it hands down does make financial sense. In a society entirely driven by capital and profit, it makes sense, but from a consumer perspective, it fucking sucks. I don’t want to have to install the Facebook app to see some small businesses “web site” that’s really just a Facebook page. I don’t want to install reddits shitty native app to read more than 2 comments off a post about a solution to my problem.

It’s legitimately consumer hostile, but company profits are more important than people in our society.

All I see are people talking about consumer apps that could be websites, but it’s a problem in the business world, too. My small business makes a service for other small businesses and all our big competitors use apps for their system while we use a web app. Some even restrict to only iOS or Android, too. It blows our potential customers’ minds when they see that ours is just a website with at least as much functionality as the competition and the ability to access it from anything.

I have no idea why anyone would do it differently as it’s WAY easier/cheaper to maintain this website than deal with app ecosystems. And there simply aren’t enough users in this space to merit data scraping like with consumer apps.

They want to wall some of their content off so it’s not easily harvestable on the web by competitors. But most of all, they want to have full control of your user “experience” so you can’t use browser extensions (like ad blockers). It’s all about money and control.

From a technical point of view, it sometimes makes sense:

• access to more interesting API
• guaranteed persistent storage
• no compatibility issues (different browsers, settings, extensions, etc.)

Of course, that’s just what could be done easier with an app. There’s also some less interesting points:

• giving less control to the user
• accessing more things than needed
• making the experience worse by hooking every single events out of the webview

So… the answer is “because”.

I want apps to be apps again.

On my desktop I have browser tabs for WhatsApp, messenger, Skype, gMailChatTalkHangouts and slack. I know slack’s app was ass but I miss the rest.

I want a discrete app that doesn’t crash with chrome and which sits in my tooltray so I don’t have to fucking search for it whenever something makes a noise (ctrl-alt-a). I want to see it from the blink in the corner and not by scanning 31 windows of 7 groups of 12 tabs each.

Often times I just give up and hope it also makes my phone spork too so I can grab it there.

To spam you with ads and steal more of your data of course! Look at the insane permissions on these apps: There’s no reason for them to have access to your contact list, text messages, app manifest, etc. The vast majority of apps have wildly unnecessary permissions because it gets the companies more of your data.

Sometimes they can get more data out of your phone through an app then through your default browser.

Or feed you more ads.

I would say in some cases, people are conditioned now to expect an app, even if it’s basically a website. I think in a mobile context, most non-techy people don’t normally think to open up a browser and say, browse Amazon or something. Instead they go for the Amazon app on their phone, and browse/shop/whatever there.

I wouldn’t say this is exclusive to phones either. I once worked on a product that was essentially web-native, but they had to ship a desktop app because their market expected it, even though it was only a web-view wrapper to the website. No offline storage, no difference in behaviour, or need for some specific API; nothing. I guess you try explaining to boomers that a web-view desktop app is unnecessary.

The data vacuuming and additional marketing are just added benefits for the app developer, if they go down that path (they usually do).

Because the majority of internet connections these days are from a mobile device. And if you want to reach the average person, you have to be where they are looking.

I think it’s really a shame that mobile OS’s are so locked down that the only real way for people to download things is through some centralized app store.