Setting up your business? The app vs website battle is on! We are often asked by our clients .What would be a better starting point for their business. – A website or a mobile app. Well, to answer this question, you need to be clear about a few things related to your business and how your customers interact with you.
Answering the below questions can help you make a decision on whether you need an app or a website.
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Who is your audience and what device do they use?
Looking into your Google Analytics data can help you understand who your audience/customers. What devices they use most of the time. According to reports from Statista, mobile devices account for about half of the web traffic worldwide.
While the global website traffic from mobile devices was around 50% at the beginning of 2017.It has reached 50.81% in the third quarter of 2020 and is increasing constantly.
The growth in the mobile-first online population clearly shows the increased preference. For mobile devices for the most popular internet activities worldwide. So besides having a mobile-friendly website, having a mobile app helps in attracting more mobile users.
Do your users visit your app vs website multiple times in a day?
If the answer is yes, it clearly suggests that having a mobile app is the best choice. Being available for your users to access your website or app. Just in a few clicks will help retain them for longer and build a loyal user base.
A mobile app comes with the benefits of providing a personalized experience for your users base on their location .In real-time to provide geography-specific content. It will certainly make reaching your potential and existing users easier compared to a website. So app vs website, my vote goes to the app.
Do your users see a need to use your product offline?
Limited access to the internet can be a major problem at times. When in places like trains, basements, forests, elevators, it is tough to use most of the apps on our phones. This is when it makes complete sense in building a location-dependent app. For your product and this is how the app beats the website once again in this competition.
Apps like Google Maps and Tripadvisor allow us to download the required data for offline usage. Building an app with similar data accessibility when offline will attract more users than a website can.
Do you need to access the native features of a phone?
Providing your users with the best user experience often requires the need to access the phone’s native features like camera, sensors, GPS, Contacts list etc. If this is something your product needs, then you should go with a native app instead of a web app. This helps the users by reducing the effort of manually entering data wherever needed.
Consider an instance where a user needs to share the contact information of a person from his contact list, allowing the app to access your contact list will make it easier to attach the contact details rather than entering the name, number and other details manually.
Similarly, in places where a user needs to upload a photograph, enabling access to the camera would make it very convenient to quickly take a photograph and complete the process effortlessly.
Seems like we are very close to getting the winner of this app vs website battle.
Is speed a concern for your business?
It is a fact that apps are faster than websites. A well-designed mobile app can provide users with a faster and seamless user experience compared to a website. The loading time of a website is higher as they use web servers while apps store the data on mobile devices thus making data retrieval swift.
Technically speaking, the framework used by a mobile app enables it to run faster than a mobile website designed used javascript code. Users with mobile apps can complete their actions quickly and most importantly, the app also stores their preferences saving them a lot of time.
Is the notification feature something your business can benefit from?
Businesses have used email as their primary tool for communication for a very long time. But with time and with emerging technology, the effectiveness of email has dropped significantly. This is the age of mobile apps and the star performer is the notifications feature.
Coming in two types, push and in-app notifications Mobile App vs Website, this feature has totally changed the way businesses communicate with their users less intrusively. The in-app notifications can be received by users only when the app is open whereas the push notifications can be received at any time regardless of the on-going activity on the users’ mobile device.
Conclusion:
Developing both the mobile app vs website can be very expensive. So considering your business goals and your budget, you will have to go with one of these to start off with Mobile App vs Website . Both the channels have their own advantages and disadvantages, mobile apps being widely preferred by users across the globe, definitely has more to offer for the growth of your business. So if you ask us, “App vs Website?”, our preference is clearly the app.
