Many marketers are familiar with the concept of building mobile applications for today’s smartphones, but most aren’t sure whether their company should build a mobile-optimized website or a native mobile app to deliver on their specific business needs.
The answer largely depends on the needs of your specific program goals. Marketers can start by asking themselves the following questions:
• Who is my target audience?
• What type of mobile functionality am I looking for?
• Do I have the analytics on what browsers, OS and hardware my consumers use to visit our site?
• What are my budget and timeline requirements?
Based on the answers to the above questions, you can determine whether mobile Web or a mobile app will best meet your business and user requirements.
HTML5 standards and native mobile device browsers are evolving so quickly that the gap is closing between what can be accomplished from inside a browser versus what can be done using a native (rich) application. One reason why you might choose to build a rich app is because your requirements demand a long-running service that persists in the background of a mobile device. For example, you might need a background service for indefinite location tracking, device monitoring or lengthy calculations/processes. A native app could launch a third-party QR Code scanner application from within your own device that directs you to a specific URL. Many of these apps will allow you to “share” content with other apps, so it’s possible to get your app to appear in the list of possible choices (for instance “sharing” a place from within Google Maps). This unique interoperability makes a very strong case for building a native application rather than a Web app.
However, most of the latest smartphone and tablet browsers allow for the development of nearly identical functionality using WebKit transforms via some JavaScript, but these types of Web apps lack many of the tracking elements mentioned above. But the fact you can develop once and automatically target every Web-enabled platform is quite a powerful reason for choosing to write Web apps. Compare this to developing an Android, iPhone and Blackberry app separately, and it’s easy to see the major advantage here.
In our view, the actual cost of development, speed of deployment and cross-platform usability makes Mobile Web the clear winner.
