Our clients, analysts, partners, media and technical nerds all agree on one thing: there is no agreement on mobile apps vs. mobile web. Last week, our Account Director Caroline van den Bergh spoke at the Getjar Conference in London to shed light on the current situation.
Her speech makes clear why there will be no winner in the near future:
1. Rate of Technology Improvement
- HTML5 is a common standard by WC3 that took 5 years to develop. Getting to the next major release of HTML will take just as long.
iOS and Android are proprietary development standards with at least one major and several minor releases a year (iOS 5 had more than 1500 new APIs)
Innovation will continue to happen at a much faster pace for apps than for the mobile web. To deliver the latest and greatest new features, hardware, user experience and speed, the only option is apps.
2. Discovery
It is still easier to drive traffic to an app than to a mobile website without spending money on advertising. An app is promoted through the appstores, especially when launched. External sites often review and suggest apps to their readers. This creates natural exposure, that is not present for sites.
3. Purpose
Frequently used utilities whose features don’t require an internet connection will benefit greatly from apps. Services that are almost completely updated every day such as news may be easier to deliver through a mobile website, although stickiness may increase with an app.
If you are a well known brand and want to benefit from the mobile channel you probably need to invest in both mobile web and apps. In terms of budget, mobile websites are generally much simpler and therefore cheaper. That said, a mobile website and an app of the same complexity will cost about the same, but you'll have to develop the app again for each new platform – porting between platforms simply doesn't get the quality level that our brands expect.
For more about the cost of developing mobile apps see our previous blogs.
To find out more about mobile web vs apps download the full presentation here.
No comments:
Post a Comment