Mobile Website VS Mobile App: Where Should a Business Focus and Why?
In buying anything, customers mostly research on mobile devices, whether in browsing about the product or investigating on social pages. Mobile devices made business efforts for the web and social presence extremely easy now. Moreover, Google search ranks give more priority to mobile-optimized sites now.
So, while all statistics and market trend go in favor of mobile, mobile web or mobile app what should a business choose as a priority? While both mobile web and mobile app have their pros and cons, businesses can think of adapting to mobile by taking advantage of both as per the context and evolving necessity.
The Difference between a Mobile App and a Mobile Website
A mobile website helps to access a website from mobile devices without the typical viewing and interactive constraints of small screen mobile devices. Mobile websites are designed to perform, integrate device functions and offer interactive elements of the mobile devices. You need to have a mobile website just to make your standard business website available for the mobile users.
A mobile app, unlike a mobile website, refers to a native software application designed particularly for mobile devices. A mobile website allows access anytime when using the web browser on the mobile devices, a mobile app needs to be downloaded and installed from the respective app store for accessing it.
Mobile Website over Native Apps
If the business objectives are primarily concerned with marketing or public communications a mobile website may be the best choice to reach the target audience. As a practical first step in your mobile outreach strategy. A mobile website offers larger accessibility, easy compatibility, device friendliness and cost competitiveness.
- A mobile website can be accessed instantly by users through a browser on a whole range of mobile devices including smartphones and tablet PCs. Apps in contrast to them need downloading and installing the mobile app from the app store to view the contents. A mobile website can be accessed by users over all kinds of devices while native apps always represent a specific platform.
- A mobile website offers more dynamic attributes compared to an app as it is highly flexible for updating contents and making alive with regular inclusions and omissions. From the change of design to content upgrade, everything can be done easily and on a regular basis on the mobile website. And on the other hand, mobile app needs pushing the updated version for the users further allowing downloading of the app separately in different devices.
- Mobile websites are far more discoverable than mobile apps as they are showed in search results or listed in directories of different industries.
- Mobile website links or URLs can easily be shared among users through a variety of platforms and interfaces including email, text message, social media post, etc. You can easily direct users to a mobile website by sharing the link on a blog or website or even through a printed document.
- Mobile websites are almost permanent as they cannot be deleted and to make it remain alive a business needs to have the domain name for a longer period of time and a hosting plan. On the other hand, the average lifespan of an app is extremely short.
- Mobile websites can be designed as a web app performing and functioning like the native apps.
- Building mobile website is comparatively less time consuming and far more cost-effective compared to the native mobile app building.
- While a mobile website does not need regular technical support and maintenance except content upgrades and design change in months, an app besides frequent upgrades needs testing, compatibility check, and frequent design optimization. Naturally, the technical support and maintenance are much expensive for mobile apps compared to mobile websites.
When an app makes sense over the mobile website?
In spite of the diverse advantages of the mobile web over mobile apps, for a number of reasons mobile apps have an invincible appeal for the users. An app can play an important role in following situations.
- Gaming: For interactive interfaces and purposes like games you cannot think of anything other than an app.
- Regular usage and personalization: Banks are increasingly coming with native apps to let their regular users make a transaction and choose transaction in a personalized manner. Productivity and educational apps are also great examples of this.
- Complex data-oriented tasks: For representing data with complex charts, calculations or for generating quick reports apps are invincible. Financial apps, enterprise apps for the sales force, etc. are good examples.
- Native function dependent: Though mobile web browsers these days are getting smarter to integrate device functions, still for accessing all interior device functions like the device camera, fingerprint scanning, etc. mobile apps are way ahead of the websites.
- No need of connection: Finally, native apps allow you working without internet connection while mobile web cannot open without internet connectivity.
Making use of mobile website and mobile app both
The majority of users discover a product or service or company by searching the web. Now as mobile search is increasingly surpassing the desktop searches, the vast majority of searches on the web are likely to happen on mobile devices. So, having your own mobile website is incredibly important for your business. With a mobile website, you make your business easily discoverable for millions of users accessing the web through mobile devices. But to make your website more discoverable to users you need posting regular and relevant contents.
But if you have a customer base and want your customers sticking to the brand and come back repeatedly to make a transaction, mobile apps become more important.
Unlike the business website the mobile app stays let your customers stick to your business continuously as the apps easily occupy an area of the mobile device screen. Finding an app enjoyable the users are likely to use it quite often. Mobile apps find it hard to engage users but once they can they have a lead in interacting with users and driving business.
So, you should use the website for making your business discoverable and drive traffic, while you should utilize the mobile app to let your loyal users stay connected with you. You can promote your app and push download through your website only.
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