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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
I believe Spotify did this back in the day in order to hide as much of their AB testing from Apple who is essentially a competitor due to iTunes.
Having much of the UI delivered via web also makes it easier to deploy updates as no software update is necessary.
They can make money off the downloads I would think.
Unless they're charging for the app (and if it's just a webview probably not), it actually costs them money to be on the App Store or the Play Store.
I've found most of them work much nicer and load faster.
I cannot speak for them, but I can relate to the idea. There's one called Nobly that was based on a great idea but eliminated itself due to this.
Ad revenue. It is harder to block ads on mobile than it is on desktop.
For certain things it makes sense to have an app imo, for instance music streaming services the desktop experience just has more features, plays better with my preamp/headphones and so on.
For something like Netflix it’s extremely irritating that they either intentionally gimp the experience of using the service on many browsers (IIRC Netflix is capped at 720p in Firefox still) or try to force users into using the app (see YouTube attempting to automatically redirect you to the app anytime you try to watch a video in the browser).
I'm torn - apps are brutal for privacy but I really like the isolation from browser and all other sites. I typically clear browser cache on every exit so for apps that I use regularly, I am forced to sign in every time if going in through browser.
Wish browser apps had better isolation for multiple sessions.
Firefox Focus on Android sounds right up your alley.
I have it and use it. It's great (works for most sites). My point is actually the opposite - there are certain sites/services that become very unpleasant to use if you have to log in everytime you open the browser.
The advantage of apps is that for those particular services you don't have to reauthenticate each time you open them (the trade off being insecurity.
Using websites would be great if I could have a separate (isolated) instance per site. That way I could kill browse history for general browsing.
(The absolute worst are the apps that hop out to the browser (especially when they hard code Chrome, which I avoid where possible on Android.))
On the PC (by way of example), edge and chrome have web applications that are handy (think YouTube and YouTube music) but.... they share credentials! I keep a separate login for YT vs YTM (because google completely misunderstood the reason people keep videos separate from music when they killed the excellent Google Play Music). So... When I log into one, flips the default login for the other. Now, if they were separate apps, like on Android, the sessions are separated - as they ought to be!
I will say that Duck Duck Go's App Tracking protection is a fantastic way to tackle the way apps 'phone home' so much, however, since it leverages a full tunnel (yet local) VPN technique, you have to disable it if you want to connect to another VPN service.
(Bottom line - website based services are great, but, for goodness sake, I wish one had the option to persist various sites, but in isolation.)
This is why I love kbin. No nonsense apps just a PWA that works splendidly. Now I don't need a mastodon or lemmy app! It's all here!
FWIW, I've been using lemmy in a browser exclusively, not even a PWA and it works fine.
I'm not aware of a PWA implementation that supports multiple tabs either.
