&gt; regularly used as Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or Soundcloud<p>And there&#x27;s the problem. I don&#x27;t use any of those four sites regularly, but I have visited all of them. Hyperlinks provide for that, and they (a) don&#x27;t exist or at best would be awkward in a native app (not that webapps handle them well to begin with, though all of the above do allow for them at least) and (b) work between apps, platforms, and what-have-you. If I got a link to some image, &lt;160 character sentence, comment thread, or song and was prompted to download an app, I would probably not view that content instead.