>>>are incentivizing customers to use the app rather than the browser
>
>Assuming that there is such a word as "incentivizing" (if there is, there shouldn't be), why are they doing that?
>How does the company benefit when the customer uses the app rather than the browser?

They all love to have some kind of lock-in for their customers. Assuming these would be too lazy to just swipe to the browser when they get bored with this thing which gets them nowhere else but within the content provided by just one source.

Actually, they don't like customers, they want consumers.