Most businesses have rapidly pushed us their apps rather than providing services through their websites. The users have been told that you would get a far more "immersive" experience than a website could ever give. But "hey just give me control over your SMSs, your photos, your videos, your location and of course your ability to control what a website can do through browser controls".
These businesses cloaked these acts as beneficial to the users by the so-called gate keepers called App Stores. Publish your apps to the App Stores, get users to install your software on their phones -- just because the App Stores say they are safe. In fact in the Computer Science community, running untrusted code has always been a big issue. That is why web standards evolved into accepting Javascript as a safe-enough language that can do little harm. In fact, Google wrote a beautiful system's paper in 2009 on how to make untrusted code run safely: "Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code".
I have highlighted these security issues with the Apps and why Web browsers are a better alternative almost a decade back. But people loved apps, businesses loved apps and now the App Stores love Apps because they can impose an App-Tax ranging from 15% to 30%. The businesses are now enraged-- "hey we only signed up to get control of our users, we didn't sign up to share revenue with you".
Irrespective of how the battle plays out, it should be clear to the users that Apps are not the way they should have chosen to access Internet services. The "immersive" experience were drowning the users earlier and are now drowning the businesses. There will be only two winners, the ones that control the App Stores: Apple and Google.
