It seems to be a holdover from the social media goldrush, where no web app was complete without a way to follow people and so on. Thus you 'need' the app to get

It seems to be a holdover from the social media goldrush, where no web app was complete without a way to follow people and so on. Thus you 'need' the app to get push notifications about the latest scribblings of your network. Of course, you don't really, because you can just as well follow the same people on Twitter or whatever. Most traditional media orgs don't even have that excuse, of course, and are merely trying to cajole you into reading the stuff in a place where you can't turn off the ads.