>I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!

I think the post both directly and indirectly answers its own question when it states that the app does two things:

>It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers. >It shows you advertisements (which they call “inspirations”) for other trips organised by the same agency.

It's a lot easier to be user-hostile with an app than a website, and a lot harder for the average user to detect or block the bad behavior. Just about everyone at this point knows how to install a content blocker, open dev tools, and block stuff with their browser. The number of people with the ability, time, and energy to circumvent cert-pinning and inspect an app's traffic like this guy did is significantly smaller.

There's a reason why every company is constantly shoving apps down our throats and telling us all the cool young people are mobile-first.