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The voice of experience

App or Web page?

Posted by Peter Labrow on 9 July 2010

With the rise of the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android, some clients have been asking about the pros and cons of having ‘app’ versions of parts of their websites.

‘There’s an app for that’ has become something of a catchphrase. And indeed, it does seem that – whatever you are looking for – there is an app to help you do it.

Which leads companies to ask: do I need an app version of my website, or perhaps just part of it?

Well, the idea’s not a bad one – but there’s a very big ‘it depends’.

Typically, when the question is asked, the customer is thinking about the iPad or iPhone, which have massive market share and even bigger media coverage.

I’m a fan of both – but that doesn’t mean creating an app is more logical, or effective, than having a mobile version of part of a website.

A big downside with going down the app route is cost. There isn’t one app format, so which platforms are you going to develop for? Apple? Android? Blackberry? Nokia? Sony? Apple may have the biggest market share, but they are far from being the only player in town and the user numbers of non-Apple devices are far from small. Only developing an iPhone/iPad app could be akin to saying ‘we only want to market to 20% of our possible customers’.

Once you start developing for multiple platforms, your costs double, triple, quadruple and – well, you get the picture.

Yet most companies don’t need their app to do anything amazing: just provide a device-friendly view of a specific section of a website. For example, allow customers to find a product or service. Well, you don’t need an app for that.

A Web page (or Web app) can look pretty much like a native application on all devices using style sheets to change how the information is displayed depending on which device is being used to look at it. You’re using an iPhone? No problem – here’s the iPhone pages. An iPad – you’ll want these then.

The advantages are many. Development costs are slashed enormously, for a start – because you’re only managing one code base. You don’t have a problem rolling out software updates (waiting for app store approval, for instance) – you just implement as you need to. You can even include some of the sexier stuff that you’d expect in an app, such as ‘find the nearest x to me’.

And, when new devices come out, the chances are that your mobile site already supports them – or can, with relatively few tweaks to the style sheets.

Apps do have their place – it depends on the depth of experience you want to offer. There’s an excellent app for browsing homes for sale, for instance, that works far better on the iPad than a Web page.

It’s really a question of looking at what you want to do, whether you can (or want to) create a buying/browsing experience that goes beyond what the Web can do – and if you have the budget to develop for multiple platforms. Develop for one alone is a bit on the insane side, unless you’re confident that your target audience almost exclusively uses that device.

Creating marketing for mobile devices should be like any other marketing decision – driven by business case, logic, demographics and budget. Doing it just because it’s cool doesn’t make sense.

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