Mobile Web Design: Pros and Cons of Apps and Mobile Websites - 4 of 4

So, let's talk about apps for a few minutes. Apps are a very popular thing. Last I heard was that Apple had 400,000 apps in their app store and they had their 10 billionth downloaded app last month. Google's Android app store is at 200,000 apps. So one things with apps is that I'm kind of anti-app because most of the time you don't need them. And I'm going to talk about the pros and cons in a little bit but one of the things I want to say is that apps are optional, but a website is not. Whether or not you optimize your website for a mobile audience, people are still going to be going to it. Either they have a bad experience and bounce off of it, or they're going to have a good experience and they're going to stay there and they're going to be the Geico case study that Michael was talking about.

One CTIA panelist member said that the mobile browser is the mobile browser is the most used app on the phone. So people are surfing the Internet more than they're using apps. Actually, Google pushes for mobile websites a lot. That's probably because Google makes money on mobile search, but that's a different topic.

So, apps are good except for games, social media, maps, and music. This was found by Adobe Scene 7 as a survey they conducted. If you're looking for demographic information and what people are doing on smartphones, this is a great free report. Just pop in Adobe Scene 7 into Google and you can pull that up. I want to also add that if you have something that is very interactive, an app might be good for that.

So the advantages to native apps are they're able to utilize device capabilities. They're able to use the gyroscope, the camera, etc. That's why this makes sense for games and what have you. They're able to take complete control over the user interface. For social media for instance, if you want to be notified when someone posts on Facebook, a website can't do that. So you'd need an app for that. You'd achieve high performance.

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Science & Technology

Tags:

• mobile web design
• apps
• pros
• cons
• mobile websites
• mobile sites
• disadvantages
• advantages
• mobile apps
• iphone apps
• native apps
• android apps