Are apps even that relevant anymore?

I try avoid installing apps unless it's something I really want and the app is far better than the web site. Apps these days are loaded with spyware. I assume that any mobile app will track me as much as it can possibly get away with. It's almost like voluntarily installing malware.

Web sites track too of course, but their capacity to do so is more limited. I fully revoke location, camera, and microphone from the browser, so all it can do is track me on the web and get a very rough idea of location via GeoIP. Desktop apps can also track, but mobile offers a lot more intimate information (especially location) and is constantly connected.

There are many reasons:

1. They want the distribution effect of the app store. You can go from zero to king overnight if the app store features your product.

2. Unless you're building a dumb wrapper around a CRUD backend app, most apps need access to the state of the art API. Especially if you're aiming high, chances are, you won't be able to find a new app idea without using the new APIs because the old APIs have been experimented on by millions of developers already.

3. Apple has declared recently that they're going to cripple the browser localstorage and cookies so everything gets reset if you don't use them for 2 weeks. I think they will do this more and more (it's also good for user privacy so they do have a moral high ground)

I think that there are still certain classes of app that benefit strongly from being native rather than just a web app.

To give an example, Christian Selig's Apollo iOS client for Reddit is lightyears ahead of both the Reddit mobile website and the official Reddit iOS app. By using the native iOS APIs and matching what people expect from gestures on an iOS app, he's able to create an amazing experience for users.

> Even now with my own projects, a well optimised mobile website beats an app most times.

I seriously doubt that, if my 8 core macbookpro has issues with half of the web (event my own react projects of sizable complexity start to have issues), doubt mobile devices don't. And I honestly can't speak for Android, but being both and iOS and React developer, iOS performance in pretty much anything compared to React is amazing.

Also, the second part, I have been doing research lately, and while the dev.to or HN crowd says they visit the mobile websites, market research shows that people spend around 90% of their time in apps versus 10% in mobile web, so seem users find them relevant.

I know developers don't like 'closed' systems and love the web, but I (and most people I know) personally prefer a app over a mobile experience 99% of the time.

Almost all of those have been solved by Android's PWA implementation. I can go to an enabled site and add it to my apps list. After that, it looks and acts like any other app on the device [except that it doesn't take up any space on my phone :)]