It's been 13 years of "no, you can't do in the phone's webbrowser the thing you can do in a PC's webbrowser, you need to install a fucking app". People just accepted it. The fuckers accepted it.
The browser represents a political statement that the rendering of the web page ought to be under the control of the user. The app is a capitalist reaction to that statement.
The web browser is under the control of Google. The app is just a thing actually designed to run on your computer that can actually utilize its features.