Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps.
I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason related to your actual use of the app for a notification, but lately Yelp and Hotwire have just started brazenly spamming ads unrelated to any activity. So I uninstalled those two, and am now much more resistant to installing new ones.
I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason related to your actual use of the app for a notification, but lately Yelp and Hotwire have just started brazenly spamming ads unrelated to any activity. So I uninstalled those two, and am now much more resistant to installing new ones.