In most cases, I find the apps are actually worse than using the browser. A lot of them are little more than branded Webkit wrappers, with $SITENAME in a coloured bar across the top. If you're going to force me to use an app, it needs to offer some really concrete advantages over the site, and should actually act like an app. One simple win would be a global text resize setting -- give me the option to increase, or decrease, text size throughout your app and then remember it.

One mobile app that I do think `does it right' is eBay's. It's not spectacular, but it's much better than their mobile site and feels like I'm using a real app. It really needs to improve upon its caching behaviour, though.