Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.

Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.

Web browsers have good (not perfect) sandboxing, costs no fees to "submit" and are accessible to everyone on every phone.

The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.

You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.

Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism.

Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come back to some state. I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly use these apps for any serious work.

The UX of almost all native mobile apps is absolute crap. But it's not their nativeness that makes them crap. I'm not complaining about the idea of operating systems offering non-portable but high performance UI primitives that make use of OS facilities.

Many native desktop apps don't have these UX issues (at least not all of them at the same time). It's the mobile UX patterns, conventions and native UI frameworks that are causing this catastrophic state of affairs.