A good compromise is to educate users on how to add a shortcut to their homescreen. I don't think people (including product people) know about this feature, and mobile browsers bury it. The pareto principle applies: 80% of stickiness is that icon, which you can get for 20% of the effort of an app.

It doesn't work for me.

All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...

Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.

On Android the shortcut icon is derived from the favicon, so material design doesn't apply. (There is also a "badge" for the browser app itself).

One way or another there are a bunch of Google-app icons that all look the same to me. Third party apps on iOS or Android generally have nondistinct icons: I have many icons that are basically a letter like "H" with no indication that one of those icons controls my stereo and another one does something else. I use Microsoft' RDP on my iPad all the time and I struggle to find the icon not least because the colors blend into the background but it is just some arrows without stems like the logo of some british railway from the 1970s.

I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.

Well it sounds like your problems go far beyond the thing we're talking about. Good luck!

Personally it’s been a long time since I launch anything besides ~4 apps (phone, messages, browser, mail) from the homescreen. There are wayyy too many apps for that (because of BS like reddit is doing) - I always drag down and start typing the app name into search to launch.

I've gone the other way and just don't use very many apps. I'll only use an app instead of the site if I find the app provides actual added value *to me*. And that is not often the case.

And for cases that force you to the app instead of the webpage, I don't use that site on my phone. Which tends to start a cycle where I stop or at least greatly reduce using that that site.

I'm generally not cynical about human motivations, but after seeing many of these things and how thoroughly the "internal propaganda" at tech companies works, I think those are just the reasons they tell themselves. The real reason is the control and the deep analytics that you can get from mobile apps. Plus having an app icon which really does boost engagement, but nowhere enough to justify on its own.