I was reading an ACM research paper recently that considered users' revisitation patterns. The authors found that users tend to revisit native apps far more often than they revisit pages in browsers.
The clear message to web designers is to point users to installing the NIA to increase the probability of revisits (2775).
Yet, there is a growing popular conception, as evidenced by a recent xkcd comic, that native apps are of lower quality than in-browser mobile sites and apps.
Source: xkcd: App
As the comic indicates, it's annoying to users to prompt them repeatedly to download the app. Yet the research paper indicates that it's in your best interest to nudge users toward downloading because doing so will increase their likelihood of revisitation.
Let's assume that you have created an app of equal or higher quality to the mobile site. Let's also assume that some of your users are tired of downloading apps of lower quality than the web-app or mobile site versions.
Without annoying users, how do you nudge them toward downloading your app? Should you even be trying to nudge them to download in the first place?
users installed NIAs [native internet applications] that “stuck” to their vocabularies for longer periods of time. In a sense, this emphasis on a new type of bookmarking (installing NIAs to springboards) has afforded iPhone users to optimize their devices.