What difference does it make to them? Why are apps pushed so aggressively when they have to maintain the desktop site anyway?
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Tracking is much easier and more invasive with an app. You can’t block ads in an app. You are less likely to click off and go to a different site when you’re in an app vs. a browser.
The company can collect more information from your device if you use their app than if you use their mobile website.
They can send you notifications with the app to keep your attention and keep you coming back more frequently.
A well designed app can offer a better user experience than a mobile website which may make it more enjoyable for you to use that company.
In addition to the other reasons listed, 2/3 of people engage with the internet on a mobile device, and an app allows for much better control over the experience, which keeps users hooked. Almost any comparison of a site’s mobile web vs mobile app will make clear how much better the app experience is.
Users are getting more savvy with internet privacy. Many run ad-blockers and/or VPNs to block adverts and obfuscate their location, as well as limit the tracking cookies that the website can use – there are some browsers that are building some of that in.
An App can track you much more intimately, serve you ads with no real way to block them, and do lots more snooping on your phone by requesting things like media storage access, while also making it harder to escape that ecosystem just by switching tab. One user-experience benefit is that the app can download things like new stories in the background to provide a more seamless experience with intermittent connectivity.
Everyone is mentioning ads and data collection, but I think it’s simpler than that: when you install an app it shows up on your phone’s home screen where you see it all the time. That might encourage you to use it more often.
Second, sometimes an app can do more than a website can do.
I have worked for companies that do this, and there were no ads involved – so many of the comments here are about ads but many apps/sites do not have ads because they want you to actually buy something, subscribe, etc or otherwise use the product on a regular basis.
The main reason is that it’s really obvious in data that app users engage more, use the product more, and monetize better. You can do randomized experiments with aggressive app-promotion tactics and find that converting web users into app users increases all kinds of metrics.
The underlying reasons for this are some combination of apps being easier to use than mobile web sites, push notifications, and ease of access once installed.
I’m a software engineer working on both a website and an app for a startup. (I won’t say which because this is not an advertisement.) My company’s practices may or may not be typical, so anything I say here doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone.
Foremost: The reasons my company push for users to be on the app have nothing to do with tracking. We don’t track user data other than stuff like, which features are people using and what kinds of errors are people getting. We track these things exactly the same on web as we do on the app. We don’t show advertisements on either the website or the app.
A quick primer on how we write code: We use libraries, which are volumes of code written by others that handle common things like taking in user inputs and displaying things on the screen. My company uses libraries called react for our website and react-native for our app, among many others.
A big reason we prefer users get our app is that the amount of control we have on react-native is way better when dealing with touches. React is designed primarily with mouse-and-keyboard interaction in mind, meaning our mobile-web interface works nicely when users tap things (it’s exactly like a click), but has trouble when dragging or swiping, since doing these things would normally scroll you down the page. (Click-hold-dragging on a mouse is, in contrast, really easy to detect because there’s nothing else a user could be attempting when clicking and holding.) React-native automatically figures out whether a drag should be a scroll or a grab-and-drop, which saves us a lot of effort.
Because of the above, we actually design our app differently from our mobile website: You can only interact with the mobile website through taps, but you can do all sorts of gestures on the app. This actually means we show fewer buttons on the app and more movable elements. Fewer buttons means the screen looks less cluttered.
Just generally, the browser model of everything being a page is kind of annoying to deal with on mobile. For example, it’s very common on mobile to travel between a lot of different screens, so naturally you’d want your back button to go to the previous screen. In a browser, this is kinda awkward because the browser probably deloaded the previous page when going to the current page (this saves memory), and now we have to load that previous page again. But react-native has an add-on that automatically and efficiently remembers where you were on the previous screen whenever you open a new screen on top of it, and takes you there when you hit the back button.
Note that all the data required to use the app is saved on your device, meaning we don’t need to transfer nearly as much data to your phone when loading, meaning our app loads much faster than our site. For desktops, that time spent is usually unnoticeable, because desktops typically have good internet connections. But mobile devices are often on data with spotty connection and minimizing data transferred is really important. Also, websites don’t work at all when fully offline, which is fairly important to our users – they’re often using the app when offline, just by nature of what our app is for.
We actually previously did use the website for everything. But we started building our app because it actually can provide users with a better experience.
TLDR: The way websites on mobile work is often slightly different from the most comfortable way to use a phone. Apps are better at optimizing for the latter.
Tracking is not really it, despite it being notorious and talked about constantly, most companies dont really care about it, not to the extent portrayed. That is not thier busines model, their revenue is not data based but service or product based (most companies)
Mobile apps provide:
1) push notifications (invasive way to advertise products/sales/cross promotions etc – these work far better than sms/email for a number of reasons)
2) a better streamlined UI, a properly designed app will always provide a better user experience than a browser page on a phone.
3) Because they have to, people dont use bookmarks very well on phones or the ability to create an app icon out of a bookmark etc.. if your service has a mobile app, it will reach a higher audience.
As an aside — the amount of extra data you can get from the phone is useless, fb and google would care very much, as a few others. Most companies care more about demographics and where to spend their advertising $$$. Any company that deals with sales and collects your credit card details and address (you have to provide this) will have what they need from that.. your credit card alone says a lot about you, different products are tied to different income ranges and many service exist to prodive this data. (affluence indicies)
The advertising campaigns aimed at people with a black master-card will be different than those of someone with a student visa.
Mobile sites are hard to design for to begin with. It’s janky, very limiting, and cool features that are actually helpful like bottom sheets/drawers and overlays are hella janky on a mobile website. They push for an app download because the experience is much better, and gives you easier navigation/tabs. You are less likely to get frustrated from an app that they have control over vs a mobile web experience where they have limited control over.
I run the analytics dept. for a FTSE100 company.
App users tend to be more engaged and therefore score higher in the e-commerce metrics than non-app users. With an app you tend to get more customisation in terms of marketing which partly helps to drive this.
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