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.
The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.
You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.
Real question here, what are you trying to do when you "swipe back"?
By instinct I swipe back like I am in Safari, and that does something else in those.