An additional reason may revolve around the "walled garden" aspect of apps. vs. HTML 5 in a browser. The browser gives me, the end user, some level of control

An additional reason may revolve around the "walled garden" aspect of apps. vs. HTML 5 in a browser. The browser gives me, the end user, some level of control (adblock, user JS, etc.). An app. gives the creator of of the app all of the control. They get to force feed me advertisements via an app. that are much harder to block than if they used HTML5. They get access to much more tracking data with an app. than when an HTML5 page (although HTML is giving away the farm here too). All those aspects, plus others, further combine to push businesses in the 'app' direction so they can make money off of the attention.