Mobile apps v mobile websites

This post is in response to this question on LinkedIn answers, asking whether mobile apps or mobile websites were the better investment for business.

The question of “apps or sites?” opens an enormous can of worms and really, there is no right answer right now. It depends on the specific client, their goals, their customer base, and many more factors. The key is to choose a tactic to match those goals. Unfortunately, at the moment many clients skip that stage and start straight away with a tactic in mind (i.e. an iPhone app). Not that this isn't sometimes right by chance, but at Red Ant we try to emphasise creating a strategy first, then working out the best way to achieve it. It's the only way of preventing mobile being Dotcom Bubble 2, as cowboy agencies are all too happy to sell the client what they think they want without checking the long-term ROI.

The tide in this discussion currently tends towards mobile web, so I'll offer some reasons why apps can be a better option as well as the advantages of mobile web - a lot of clients have made big gains from the app strategy.

Briefly, the key advantages of apps lie with the user experience. The UI is smoother and fully integrated with the fabric of the phone, so they are generally much more fulfilling to use than a mobile site. Whilst it is possible to come close to the app interface experience with a mobile site (for example M&S, which is excellent work - it's telling that they choose to ape the iPhone UI), the fact is that you need a very talented team and lots of development cash to get to even a rough approximation of what you can do cheaply and easily with native UI kits on iPhone and Android. And if you see that 80% of your mobile web hits are coming from iPhones, why not give them that boost in UX?

They also work offline, which is a huge consideration often overlooked. For example, for something like a supermarket, where a user is going to be constructing a large basket, attempting to do that in spotty 3G coverage (which is fairly common at least in the UK) is going to be an exercise in timeouts and frustration, which will probably lead to abandonment. With some clever coding, you can have your entire catalogue downloaded to the phone, which the user can happily browse through at full speed on the Tube, only needing the internet for the final confirmation and purchase. This also goes for anything that might be time critical - for example, mobile ticketing or mobile vouchering would give a very poor user experience if they needed a connection for use but were offline at the critical time it was required. It's an extreme example, but would you be happy to miss a flight because your 3G was down? That said, a certain mobile vouchering app has the same problem - so just choosing an app is not a cure-all to the offline problem - you need the good design to go with it.

What Apple have created with the App Store, and what hopefully Android, Nokia, RIM and MS will catch up with in their own stores, is a customer base of affluent, savvy people used to transactions on their phone - it's early days but several studies have shown app customers are more likely to buy things than anyone else, particularly on the iPad. And obviously, if your strategy involves paying for the mobile access itself, an app is a much easier solution than a site thanks to In-App Payments and the like. If played correctly, app marketplaces can also be a fantastic discovery mechanism capable of generating thousands of downloads a day with minimal effort, performance akin to high-level SEO. Plus, right now thanks to the mainstream press love affair with Apple, apps get column inches in a way sites don't, if PR is your goal.

The other advantage, and the one likely to be the fastest eroded, is that apps generally get access to more of the hardware specific features of mobile - GPS, the camera, storage etc - and whilst web can do some of this (there's a GPS call from Mobile Safari, for example) again it's just not quite as smooth an experience. For gimmicky promotional apps, this is a big deal. They also get a permanent spot on the user's phone screen, and tend to promote quick bursts of daily brand interaction for short periods of time (the holy grail of "lifestyle integration").

Finally, the difficulties of having to put out a different version for each platform appear to be slightly overblown. Yes, there is a development cost, but since most mobile platforms are broadly similar in terms of UX, once you have your lead platform created, you have already done the difficult work of creating your mobile idea, brand, UI, and back-end integration - it's quite possible to simply offshore the basic work of the port itself and the platform specific modifications, especially since they have a standard to work to. Again, having a good strategy in place means even if they stopped making iPhones tomorrow and the world went in a different direction, you're positioned to rapidly react to the next "hot" mobile OS.

In the other corner, the advantages of mobile web are easy to see. It's generally cheaper, you're more likely to have the resources in house to do the coding (although we STRONGLY suggest having a mobile expert consult on everything apart from that - since it's relatively new, a standard web agency probably can't do it justice right now even if they say they can, although this will change over the next 2-3 years as mobile access becomes the norm). You can make instant updates to it without an approval process (and for iPhone, if you're in an area like adult services or gambling that Steve Jobs doesn't like, it's your only option). You can deploy once, and give a roughly similar UX across every smartphone (it will get the job done, even if it isn’t pretty, and at the end of the day that's easy ROI), and you don't have to worry about keeping tabs on shifts in the handset marketplace.

Don't forget SMS too - it's much like mobile web in that works universally, and is definitely still a force.

These lines are going to blur significantly in the medium to long term as mobile web standards allow websites to do more of the things apps can - local storage and the like - and we won't be making this cut and dry distinction once the feature sets are roughly equivalent and "app" becomes the word for "anything done via a mobile". However, right now, it's all about stepping back and working out a mobile *strategy*, and taking it from there.

We're going to be releasing a whitepaper on how to do this in the new year; I'd urge you all to keep an eye out for it as I hope it will clear up some of the myths, confusion and difficult choices faced by new entrants to the mobile channel.

This blog post was written by Alex Sbardella - Mobile Products Manager

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