As someone working in tech, and does digital marketing consulting, there is actually a lot of value in these interstitials:
1) Usually the app is infinitely better than the mobile web experience. You can chalk it up to prioritization of engineering working on iOS / Android app development over a mobile web experience -- usually for good reason.
2) It's a solid retention strategy. You can harp on about bounce rates reducing activation rates (bounce rates aren't as high as you might think btw in certain cases) but at the end of the day, a 1% increase in repeat purchase rate (or insert other retention metric here) will have a much much more significant impact than a 1% increase in activation.
It only works for certain scenarios and cases, but at the end of the day, there's significant data to show that they work.
It only works for certain scenarios and cases, but at the end of the day, there's significant data to show that they work.