There's an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)
The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user's home screen at all costs, because your app's icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.
But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I'd argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.
Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.
Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can't trick the longer terms statistics.
My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.
I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.
Check out the "Apollo" reddit app. Its a 3rd party app for Reddit. I've started using it and would never go back to the native Reddit app. No ads, very fast, constant updates etc.
I wish I knew why they're pushing the app so hard so I can specifically avoid doing that. If they want you to just have any app installed they'd win even if you install Apollo.