The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.
Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.
Web browsers have good (not perfect) sandboxing, costs no fees to "submit" and are accessible to everyone on every phone.
Actually, when the iPhone was introduced, Apple wanted it to have only a few select native apps (like Maps or Mail) and all the rest to be web apps.
They were browbeaten into opening an app store by the developers, who wanted to do native apps, not the other way around like you say.