They currently have a monopoly on STR listings - so they don't really need to care about user experience.

This is what you end up with.

They’re likely also trying to push users to their app.

It seems like it's product managers justifying their investment in the native applications in a lot of cases.

Anyway the most well known example is probably YT which slowly reduced over time the functionality of their Web version for mobile, and also put things in to make it more annoying, too.

"If everybody else pushes users to their app over web, there must be good reasons to do it, we should too."

Expecting companies to rationally analyzed whether that is actually the case, is, well, expecting too much of companies.

It can be a problem even for Google Captcha.

Like:

- Taxies are not yellow in all countries

- Fire hydrants like that aren't a thing in many countries either (e.g. in Germany they are below a small hatch in the ground)

- US School Busses

- Even Street Signs can look and be placed very different.

- What is recognized as a shop/restaurant and similar based on the style of the sign board

But that is typical SV: Solving problems for the US from a US perspective and assuming it works in most countries.

But most countries are _not_ like the US.

The idea that stuck with me from it is that we’ve been spoiled as devs by the early low hanging fruit version of the internet. The MVPs were enough better than non-digital incumbents that we could just export california everywhere.