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.
- text is selectable
- content is zoomable
- you can have an ad/nuisance blocker
- page source is open
While native apps have their own advantages:
- much smoother experience esp. navigation, scrolling, animations, etc.
- better overall performance (JavaScript will always lose to the native binary)
- access to hardware opens new possibilities; audio, video accelerators etc.; there's a ton of things you can't do in the browser with audio for example
- widgets, some of them are nice and useful too
- for publishers: an app icon on the home screen is a reminder, a "hook" of sorts; this is the main reason they push apps over web versions