New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why do such things like smartphone apps even exist if we have web pages?

Ask HN: Why do such things like smartphone apps even exist if we have web pages?
3 by foothebar | 6 comments on Hacker News.
Regarding how advanced today web technologies are, and how much stuff we can do in our web browsers – why do such things as (most) smartphone apps even exist? Even more: Most of these apps seem to fall into the category of providing a GUI for the functionality a server in the internet provides for it, so being a meaningless piece of software, where the creators have to program a different version for every platform, and are furthermore not allowed to do what they want, and have to share any payments with the platform providers, which get quite a piece of the cake. Instead when directly using a web page, which can be used by every device, including desktop computers, they also would have access to the devices sensors, camera, microphone, audio, position, but would only have to program once, and would be free to do what they want, including payments going only to themselves. So why do people provide (and use) apps, instead of proper web technology? Except of some really special ones (like banking), this does not seem to make any sense?