Mobile App or Mobile Website?

According to NBC, during Winter Olympic games for the first 10 days of the games users viewed about 58 mln pages on the mobile web and iPhone applications.

It’s not a secret that it is twice harder to retain old customers than to get new ones. If you want to retain your loyal customers, you have to think about some additional bonuses for them. At present when most businesses, especially the IT and software development business, are online, web development companies are competing with each other in the range of software development services and software products they can offer to their customers.

Now you have an option for reaching your clients anytime and from everywhere through their mobile devices: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. That sounds exciting but how can it be accomplished?

There are two options at the market: mobile applications development and mobile websites programming. A few years ago these options varied a lot and there were no problems in choosing between them. Now they have many features alike and whether to develop mobile application or mobile website requires careful consideration.

What is the difference between mobile applications and mobile websites? Mobile applications are designed for phones while mobile websites can work on any mobile device that has a web browser such as iPhones, Palms, Blackberries, and of course on the Internet.

If your aim is to reach the mass market and make your company interested for general public, develop mobile websites. If your targeted customers are users of some specific device, think about mobile application development.

Before taking the final decision, you have to consider how your targeted user will use your product. Mobile applications provide more functionality and the connection to the Internet isn’t required to work. That’s why mobile apps are ideal for games and utilities.

A mobile website can be a better choice if your aim is to deliver content. It's much easier to put the advertisement on a website than to a mobile device (first of all, users have to download it from somewhere to their mobile device and only after this they will be able to look at it).

What concerns development costs, in both cases it can be quite expensive if you do it from scratch but there’s one more point worth considering: if your choice is mobile apps you’ll have to develop several new apps for various devices you want to cover, whereas one mobile website is enough for any device with web browsing.

Remember if you want to change a mobile app, you’ll have to hire mobile application developers and wait for the approval from the app store. Moreover, each time a device is upgraded, you have to upgrade your app, too.

If you're just making your first steps in the mobile market, you’d better start with a mobile website. You can easily change your mobile sites (if they are well designed) into mobile apps.  If you just want to reach iPhone users, you’d better find an experienced mobile application development company with lots of experience and successful deployments.