There were several generic apps that allowed you to add any of your banks and pull transactions, setup transfers, and all other basic things you can do with a bank account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS

Then, banks discovered that they can lock their customers in an own app where they don’t hear about other banks. And also, where their developers don’t need to read and understand (and implement) the HBCI/FinTS standard.

The AJAX approach was pioneered by the Outlook web team ~1998 and semi-standardized as XMLHTTP in IE 5 (1999).

So a decade before Chrome was released.

Admittedly, Chrome did a lot to push forward web apps, but that was 100% in Google's self-interest given they were competing against thick client MS Office.

For many things there's might be a basic API available, but when you dig a little deeper you find huge limitations. Geolocation is a great example of that. Sure, it's available. But you couldn't implement a navigation app, for example. Because you can't watch the location and get updates in the background. Not to mention that accuracy and update frequency can be severely reduced in a PWA vs a native app.

Other limited APIs include things like bluetooth, audio, NFC, notifications, file system access, sensors (proximity, light, etc), camera functionality.

Safari (and therefore Apple) doesn't support things like accelerometer/gyroscope access, battery status, vibration, network info.

You can't access things like the user's contacts or calendar. And we could argue over whether limiting access to stuff like this is a good or bad thing. But the fact is that this stuff is available in various ways to native apps, but not at all to web apps.

But our phones are more powerful than the computers that landed us on the moon and are packed full of sensors and connectivity. The web is incapable of matching a native app, if it is actually doing something interesting.