If a company require me to download or install something I ammost likly looking up their direct competitors

I always assumed the reason was to get more tendrils into your phone for that sweet sweet data $$$ and allowing themselves more control over shoving notifications in your face.

Do I sound bitter?

I'm sure there are some "data harvesting" reasons, but honestly, the simplest is likely the truest:

Most people aren't computer-savvy, and having an app is much easier for most users than going to a website (either directly or through a bookmark that they probably won't ever be able to find again).

One must remember, always and forever: most people aren't us/you. Just because something is easy for you to do doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else.

Is it dumb for me that T-Mobile has an app that just goes to a webview that I could get through my phone browser? Yes. Is it dumb for my parents? Absolutely ten thousand percent no.

The value (in terms of money made/saved/protected) that a company gets from having an app instead of a website only is probably ranked in this order:

1 - ease of use for the majority of customers, reducing tech and customer support calls, angry customers, lost goodwill, bad reputation
2-99 - same as #1
100 - data harvesting

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.

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).

They can make money off the downloads I would think.

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.

I've found most of them work much nicer and load faster.

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!