I'm sure there are some "data harvesting" reasons, but honestly, the simplest is likely the truest:
Most people aren't computer-savvy, and having an app is much easier for most users than going to a website (either directly or through a bookmark that they probably won't ever be able to find again).
One must remember, always and forever: most people aren't us/you. Just because something is easy for you to do doesn't mean it's easy for everyone else.
Is it dumb for me that T-Mobile has an app that just goes to a webview that I could get through my phone browser? Yes. Is it dumb for my parents? Absolutely ten thousand percent no.
The value (in terms of money made/saved/protected) that a company gets from having an app instead of a website only is probably ranked in this order:
1 - ease of use for the majority of customers, reducing tech and customer support calls, angry customers, lost goodwill, bad reputation
2-99 - same as #1
100 - data harvesting
Do you mean early human development biologically, or early human development overall (including culturally)? Because if the latter, humans using fire to cook meat was probably significantly less important than humans using fire for heat and light.
Simplest answer (other than obviously Ep 4 was written decades before Eps 1-3):
He lied.
He doesn't know the circumstances of Luke's appearance at his doorstep (as it were), and his job - his ONLY job - is to keep Luke safe. Until he sees the message, he doesn't know WTF is going on. Why would he admit owning a droid? He's supposed to be just some old geezer in the desert.
At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.
Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it's economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it's not exceptional in any way. There's an ongoing nightmare in DRC that's orders of magnitude worse than what's happening in Gaza and... no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.
The thing is, it doesn't even matter if we "condemn this behavior." We could do that all we want and it wouldn't make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there's too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from "domestic issues" that always seem to matter more.
We've got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.