I've been thinking about this for a bit and there are a variety of reasons why it can be appealing for PMs to push for apps over webpages:

- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.

- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.

- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.

- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.

- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.

- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.

- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)

- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.

I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.