I recently got an Anova -- with touch controls, and it works great both with and without the app. The top is a big bigger to handle the screen and touch controls.

Making an immersion circulator app-only is likely a BOM-reducing measure, which is fine (given that active time is probably at most a few minutes like twice a day). And you can get smaller form factors too with app-only control (e.g. Ember Mug).