Want an App? Here’s a More Affordable Solution
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Marketing
Want an App? Here’s a More Affordable Solution
Clients often tell us they need a native app for their business – the type of application you download from the app store on your smartphone or tablet. We understand; native apps can do a lot. But nearly every time this comes up, after doing a little digging and discovery, we find out they actually don’t need a native app; a web app (which customers would simply access via their phone’s browser) would serve just as well.
While it’s true that native mobile apps offer a lot of features, web apps can provide nearly all the same features – at a fraction of the cost.
How Web and Native Apps Are Similar
A common misconception is that only a native app can drive the mobile experience. This simply isn’t true. Web apps can do nearly everything a native app can do:
- Drive customer experience on mobile
- Enhance your brand’s reach
- Direct customers to products and services
One Advantage of Native Apps
The only key difference is that web apps lack geolocation features and GPS ability. Apps like Foursquare or games like Pokemon Go can’t be made as web apps, for example.
Three Advantages of Web Apps
Web apps should nearly always be your first choice, due to these three advantages:
- More affordable
- Quicker turnaround time for updates
- Easy to add and modify content
What about Progressive Web Apps?
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a new advancement in web app design and development focused on the user experience. They’re fast, reliable and natural-feeling to consumers, combining the strong features of both native apps and web apps – for instance, being able to use push notifications and nearly instant load times. Stay tuned for more from us about progressive web apps in the future.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an app mainly to drive the mobile experience, unless you need those GPS/geolocation abilities, you should always go for a web app. You aren’t going to lose any ability to reach your customers, and you can save money while growing your business. We’d call that a win-win-win.
Need a web app? We build ’em.
Blog Author: Josh Wright, Former B teamer
Tags: Web & Digital