AFAIK this is a bunch of the most common reasons, somewhat ordered from most-important to least-important. 1. It puts an icon on your phone's home screen which

AFAIK this is a bunch of the most common reasons, somewhat ordered from most-important to least-important. 1. It puts an icon on your phone's home screen which reminds you it is there and encourages reuse. 2. They can put notification counters on said home-screen icon. 3. It is generally easier to convince people to enable notifications on the app than on the website. 4. User perception. Some users expect an app and look down on a website. (Even if functionally identical) 5. Blocking ads on websites is much easier than blocking them on mobile. 6. It can provide better tracking and analytics. 7. The app can provide a better experience. 7a. The ability to pre-download the application makes it less costly to provide more features and code. The just-in-time downloading of web applications means that the size of code, data and resources generally needs to be more carefully considered. Of course you can do careful code loading for webapps but it requires custom code instead of being managed by the store. 7b. Native apps generally have access to more APIs especially without needing to request special permission (contacts, device sensors, large amounts of storage, etc) 7c. Access to native UI toolkits can make the application fit into the expected UX better.