[_delirium]

One unfortunate thing that imo is increasing the value of app installs (and therefore how much "collateral damage" in bounce rates is worth it) is that companies are starting to use them as a push ad platforms. Once your app's on the phone, you can push notifications whenever you want, not only when the user is actively using the app. While with a mobile website, once they navigate away from the site you can't push ads until the next time they visit.

The Hotwire Android app was the first one I noticed doing this, raising notifications unrelated to actual use of the app (e.g. for bookings). If they have a general promotion, like "fall sale" or something, they push a notification to a targeted subset of users. In their case there isn't even an option in the app settings to opt out of the notification spam. Yelp was the second app I found doing this, but they at least have an opt-out in their settings menu. For apps that don't, you can entirely revoke their notification privileges in the central Android settings, but I doubt the average user knows how to do that.

My dislike for playing whack-a-mole with this kind of nonsense is why I don't install apps anymore (outside a few trusted exceptions, like Wikipedia's app), and just use mobile websites.