I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would prefer app for something they use.
I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't remember ever having a good time using it.
- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.
- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.
- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).
- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).
- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.
- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.
I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.
The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it is also that the rest of the web isn't.
Thus mobile is often even a better experience.
Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways, and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):
If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.
Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes this.
The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work, then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature work. Neither is completely functional.
As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an app?
This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.
A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.
It’s not even that. There are APIs to persist state beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.
Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device, it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful / memorable.
I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin eliminates ads.
Of the tech companies I've worked for, I can't even imagine how the web team would react if they were instructed to intentionally nerf their website.