Why are weblinks opening in an app, when no app is installed?

[bswee365]

Hi, switched from iOS to android three weeks ago and zero regrets! I'm running Android 8.1 on a Huawei P20.
I'm still getting used to android but the following is puzzling me:
In chrome, I access a website for news. While in chrome, I request the desktop site and I am transferred. I then proceed to create a link on the home screen using the "Add to home screen" chrome option and all is good. The icon has the chrome logo in the bottom right.
However, when I go to use this link from the home screen, it opens in an app... And I don't even have an app installed. There is no address bar on the process that opens. When I open recent tasks to see what is going on, chrome is there and so is the link I created (and just opened). It is a different process (separate to chrome). I say it opens as an app because when I swipe down on the home screen and search for RTE (the site I created the link to), I see the links appearing under "apps". How can this happen when I have so such app downloaded? Why aren't they just opening as a webpage? See picture for what I mean.
I discovered an option in phone settings to "open links in apps" and disabled it but the problem remains, even after creating a new link from scratch. Thanks for any ideas!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It looks like it's being treated as a Progressive Web App:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Web_Apps
https://hackernoon.com/progressive-web-apps-the-future-of-mobile-web-app-development-f29257b0dea2

If you swipe down your notification panel, you should see a Chrome notification there, which gives you an option to open the link as a Chrome tab.