Hard to believe when most apps are just a webview.

Can't relate. Except for Google Maps and Docs, I can't think of a native app that couldn't be a WebView. Hell, most of them are anyway!

The worst kind is French banking apps or IBKR app: many features are native, but then because of some weird tech debt or incompetent tech leadership, they'll sometimes show you web pages in a shitty, slow, completely different UI-wise built-in WebView for mundane tasks like downloading a PDF statement.

WASM apps get around this for the most part but there's so many more layers between the app and the hardware for web apps compared to native, plus it's javascript. And a lot of the cross-platform frameworks use a javascript bridge so that becomes the bottleneck. Kotlin/Compose multiplatform is fast on everything.

I feel like its because other than the user, the people involved have a benefit to running native instead of as a webapp. The phone OS companies get their percent of apps developed in their stores and the app developers get better access to your data to resell. Apple in particular has been really hostile to webapps.