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

most apps are just websites wrapped inside a container and made an app.

Why?

Because they dont want you to use the actual website.

why?

Cause your browser gives you a LOT of protection against invasive data mining/profiling/tracking/etc.(Not saying its perfect, We all know about fingerprinting and HTML5 canvas tracking and what have you…but its a LOT better than the information that apps can steal)

Data mining/profiling/tracking/etc that these companies want to do to you, because you are a product to them, not a customer.

And how do they do that with an app?

Permissions.

Ever wonder why your pizza ordering app has to have access to your contacts, data storage, camera, microphone, etc etc etc? Its not because its needed for you to order pizzas. Hell, you can do that on a website with no permissions, so why is it needed for an app on your phone?

So they can steal/mine your data for profiling/tracking/marketing/being sold to others/etc.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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”.

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

Or feed you more ads.

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.

Those are actually websites, with embedded site and embedded browser, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

Thats why those are slow, unstable, and huge (in occupied storage)

I worked at a company that wanted to kill their app (just a web view for the site anyway) but trying to convince all the users to move proved unfeasible

I suppose having a dedicated “launch this website” button has some level of convenience over typing out the URL

Besides the other mentioned reasons: exposure through the app store can be a motivator too.