So you say you want a mobile app, huh? Well that’s great! You want to expand your digital marketing to be easily accessible by smart phones and tablets? That’s great, you’re on the right track to staying on top of the worlds changing technologies. Now, let me ask you this: Do you need a mobile app or a mobile website?
Both a mobile app and a mobile website could support your needs, but it’s best to first evaluate your goals and situation. One might make more sense than the other.
Let me start by quickly detailing the differences between a mobile app and a mobile website. A mobile app is a self contained application that is downloaded to a smartphone or a tablet. A mobile website is accessed directly through a web browser on a device which displays either a specific version of a website (sometimes using a subdomain such as “m.website.com” or “mobile.website.com”) or a regular version of a traditional website that has responsive design (see my blog post on responsive design).
Both mobile apps and mobile websites have their pro and cons.
Mobile App Pros:
- Directness. Since the app is downloaded directly to the users device, the user can access content and work offline. Also, the app tends to be faster since it doesn’t rely on a good internet connection to do most of it’s processing.
- User interface and user experience. Websites are built for full screens and even the most sophisticated mobile website cannot compete with the UI / UX of an app, which can take full advantage of the both native software and hardware of the device.
- Presence. Your brand and connection to the user is more omnipresent. When an app is downloaded to the user’s device, they see it each time they sift through their apps. The user is not required to remember you and then navigate to your digital presence; it’s right there in front of them almost all the time (unless of course they delete your app).
Mobile Website Pros:
- Inexpensive. The planning and development work put into developing a mobile friendly website is much less intensive.
- Compatibility. Mobile websites are built for one platform. While there is some cross-browser compatibility testing that must be done, mobile browsers are much more standardized than desktop browsers. Mobile apps need to be developed and ported for different platforms (i.e. iOS, Android).
- Upgradable. Mobile websites can be updated on the server and is almost instantaneous to the user. Apps require the user to run an update to see the most recent changes to your digital presence (if you’re like me, you get annoyed by pesky update notifications… “ain’t no body got time for dat”).
Mobile App Cons:
- More expensive. Mobile app development is more expensive because you have to develop for more than one platform and the level of expertise to develop an app is greater. There’s also the factor of updating your app as opposed to updating a mobile website (as detailed above).
- Indirectness. While I stated above that directness was a pro for apps, there is an indirectness as well. To access your digital presence, the user is required to download your app from an app store. It’s simple, but people want to get what they want as quickly as possible and with as few steps as possible.
Mobile Website Cons:
- Dependent on internet connection. How quickly your content or service gets to the user is completely dependent on their device’s internet connection.
- Less integrated. Mobile apps are more integrated into the existing software and hardware of the device making photo sharing / uploading and other native fucntions like GPS more fluid. While this probably should have been a “pro” on the mobile app front, I think it speaks more to what the mobile website lacks.
Now the decision on which solution best fits your needs can be much more complex than this simple list of pros and cons, but I hope it gets you thinking and moving in the right direction.
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