Thanks for the link, that's a nice critique. That said, much of their arguments don't apply here. The article take the publisher's ("businesses") perspective, but that's not consistent with a search engine in this case - the original study is more accurate from the perspective of optimizing for the search user.

The business wants to convert low-value mobile users into high-value app installers, and would happily sacrifice most to get a few installs if that's net positive on long-term value. The search engine, on the other hand, wants as many users as possible to be successful in finding what they're looking for. These perspectives are not aligned - high abandonment rates due to interstitials can be fine for the business, yet penalized as destinations from a search engine. The underlying question is who Google optimizes for in this case, the user or the destination.

Hi Eric, good points. But what about the case in which what a user is looking for is actually inside the app? More of mobile traffic is moving into apps - shouldn't we find ways to also index and show content as well?

Hush, don't tell them--they might decide not to do it.

I built an app without having a website before so I get the perspective of the app developer here too - trying to get people to their app. But I agree that interstitials is not the answer. We ended up building mobile app content previews (deepviews) for all the apps using our deeplinks (I work for Branch.io) which work much better.