I think it's a trained behavior for a lot of users to default to wanting a mobile app instead of going to a mobile site because, at least in my experience, 9 out of 10 times the mobile web experience is flaming garbage and just infuriates me. I'm not including the sites that create specific pop-ups to use their mobile app either, like ignoring those I still find most sites just don't feel good on mobile compared to if they have an app version available.

  in my experience, 9 out of 10 times the mobile web experience is flaming garbage

In my experience, 9 out of 10 times the app experience is both flaming garbage and an additional privacy suck.

I'm not sure it's just trained behavior. There are also things like:

- permission and privacy controls work better for native apps

- native apps can run in the background (I'm not familiar with backgrounding a specific site and letting it work or send notifications).

- controlled app lifecycle, with a webapp all the latest garbage is always getting pushed to me. With a native app I can disable automatic updates and stick with a version (until the underlying API breaks, which is unfortunately often in my experience).

Also generally speaking, apps are better in that they’re nowhere near as bad as the web can be when it comes to being intrusive/annoying/demanding, and oftentimes even ads are better behaved in apps - it’s usually just a single banner or occasional interstitials, and even then there are limits on how much they can do automatically (no pinball machine redirect chains and nothing can force the user to leave the app).

This is because it behooves app devs to ensure that both their apps and any ads in them are reasonably well behaved, because if they aren’t, the user will uninstall the app with zero remorse, find a better behaving alternative, and likely never return. There’s not even a chance of some random link they encounter bringing them back to the app.

In short, most apps lend users a greater sense of control, whether it’s actually true or not (I’d say it’s a half truth).

Obviously the fix for this is for browsers to pull in the reigns on what’s possible in the name of improving user experience, placing native app-like restrictions on web apps and ad networks. This seems unlikely though, given how it would probably spur the wrath of many web app devs...

What I have noticed is apps are still to hard to download for the masses. Throw in free space problems/confusing app stores and people have stopped downloading new apps for everything & anthing and now really only download the top 10.