Because they can collect more data with a native app. A native app is far better from their perspective, but not from the user's, unless it is something computationally bound that can't handle overhead (mostly games?). The last exception is banking apps. They do a lot of weird stuff to fingerprint your phone too, but in this case the user definitely wants them to.

This is factually incorrect. A web app can do cross page tracking through cookies. An app is much more strictly sandboxed.

Maybe the simple answer is that PWAs and using web technology has never been good enough?

In the history of computing, cross platform GUI apps have always sucked compared to native apps.

I think flash and actionscript might be a counterexample? People have different standards too. In thebearly days of win3.1 I liked apps that had different widget sets, now anything that doesn't look native is considered garbage. And some people seem to consider rastered fonts equivalent to baby-eating in a professional context. I don't think I have any common axioms or value systems to carry on conversations with them, but I believe they do care, so it is probably just that PWAs are my preference, but no one elses. I prefer the web mattermost to the app for instance.

Flash is actually an example of how bad cross platform frameworks are compared to native.

Despite what Adobe said when the iPhone first came out, there was no way that Flash was ever going to run on the first generation iPhone. It had only 128MB RAM and 400 MHz processor. When Flash finally came to Mobile in late 2010 on Android, it required 1GB RAM and 1Ghz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Heck Safari could barely run on the first iPhone, it would do checkerboards until rendering could catch up with the scrolling.

And if you remember Apple’s cross platform Windows apps - iTunes, QuickTime and the short lived Safari, they also looked very bad on Windows.

Both Google and Facebook at different times said they are moving away from cross platform frameworks and web based technologies for iOS to more native software. Google has all but abandoned their cross platform mobile framework.

Web apps have ways to track users, but users have ways to mitigate this via adblockers and privacy features in their browser. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ exists to help users check their own browser fingerprint.

Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)

Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.

There is also a battery status API for web apps

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Battery_Sta...

Web audio api

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...