But I try my best to not install any apps that I don't consider necessary. I feel everyone wants to push an app for what could be achieved trivially with a website (looking at you Xfinity).
for an app with wifi permissions it's trivial, but there is no API to do this through a browser so we're stuck downloading an app
i probably would not grant full network permissions to an app anyway
Is "being in the appstore" worth that much because it's starting to be the primary thing people search when they're looking for something instead of Google?
... track you a bit better and get paid a bit more easily (if with a hefty tax), but more importantly, they can be on the Home screen of users, which people will look at a billion times per day.
Yes you can bookmark a website - and nobody does, it gets buried in some submenu you don't even know how to bring back up. Yes you can pin a bookmark on the Home screen, but people don't know how - and even if they did, they likely wouldn't get a nice icon, and it would launch an irrelevant browser interface around it, and it would all feel a bit crappy.
Whereas, people know very well how to install an app. They'll automatically get a nice big logo on their home screen, and when they tap it the magic will happen as it's supposed to be. The big logo will remind them every other minute that they might want to access the service. Etc etc.
No, you build a sizable userbase and sell out to some unscrupulous buyer who backdoors the app in a future update.
Web sites are the second best; proprietary apps should be the last resort.
Password managers provide a means of autofill with FaceID, which is the next best thing. This is how I log in to most native apps too.
I find it absurd when people complain about taxes, but it's fine when a company taxes us for profit...