The actual reason they’re doing this is advertisement. It’s easier to harvest your data and smear advertisement on your snout if you install their junk. That’s it.

The spokesperson in question is lying through their teeth; this shit is too widespread to be just a “small subset”, and odds are they know that broken browser front-end for a single site (aka “app”) is trash, even in comparison with the mobile site.

But even if we play along their lie (we should not), what they’re saying is still belittling: they’re effectively saying “don’t respect user choices; those things are not to be heard, but to be herded.”

Glad I left that shithole half a decade ago.