The question that often serves as a common platitude in today’s digitally competitive world is: What to choose between Responsive Web design and Mobile app?
Though you might think there are mixed opinions, things like this, if considered from business perspective, are really complicated. A few simplistic minds might support going for responsive web design believing that certain demographics still prefer to explore the content through mobile browsers. However, you can ascertain that today’s young age group of 18-35 have immense penchant for using relatively minimalist version like mobile apps to interact with brands.
The dilemma as to which one would be highly beneficial can be addressed by focusing on pros and cons of both approaches. In the end, you will realize that ambitious entrepreneurs who wish to capture the widest target market may opt for both device-friendly web design and mobile apps at times.
We are going to unearth solid reality raging around this dilemma. Let’s start by penetrating the actual potential of these digital concepts.
The divide between Mobile App & Responsive Web
The major difference between a mobile app and a responsive website is that website is optimized specially for ease of browsing on mobile device and has compact version of desktop website content. Its URL is usually structured as m.xyz.com. Responsive websites will adapt to any screen size user’s mobile has.
On the other hand, Mobile apps are software developed for working on each Operating System (OS) with unique codebases and UI. Built for separate OS, they are native apps that are quite popular due to its unconventional, straightforward and speedy experience.
Companies nowadays have responsive websites for various device platforms to deliver information of their business especially to new-age customers.
The Pros of Responsive Web Design
Time consumption
Creating a mobile-friendly website is undoubtedly faster than building a mobile app. This is one of the reasons business adore the idea of having a single website that is visible on various mobile devices. Developers can easily transfer the content of desktop version to mobile with minimum hassle.
Flexibility
Able to be scaled to any screen size, responsive website offer tremendous flexibility. The interactions executed on responsive mobile sites is more convenient than desktop as it requires just a smartphone and a touch-sensitive interface.
Affordability and economy
Building a responsive website is relatively more affordable than a mobile app development. Mobile app design is a cumbersome process that demands great attention to detailed strategy. Moreover, developers don’t have to create separate app for each OS or worry about major maintenance expenses. This means less involvement of human force and lean budget.
Easy updates and bug resolution
Mobile app updates require users to download a new version on and off. For website users, the updates for enhancements do not cause this trouble. Updates happen subtly without users being aware of it. Bug fixing is also easier in responsive sites.
Google’s favors
Google emphasizes on building responsive websites, which is an added advantage for search engine marketers. Responsive websites enable easy sharing and linking for contents. Google appreciates such web portals that offer smooth user experience and rank them n top of the search results.
Cons
Lack of intuitive experience
In mobile apps, UI and UX design practices are different which produces variety of look and feel for users with diverse tastes and preferences. This also means that building a common app for web and all OS systems will never yield the same intuitive experience as delivered by native apps. Responsive web design can’t offer natural feel and navigation like mobile apps do.
Mediocre performance
Responsive web structure does not give fast and functional response like native apps. Navigating through a mobile-friendly site on a phone’s browser involves poor processing, which is further subject to the volume of active traffic. Users will feel frustrated while waiting for the browser to load the entire page content as it consumes both time and battery power.
The Pros of Mobile Apps
Sophisticated brand presence
Mobile apps are trending and are considered to be a reputed way to connect with customers. Businesses can take advantage of the fact that people interact with their mobile apps quite often. Also, the presence of the app on device screen appears to be sophisticated, sleek and stunning – which adds to boost in brand awareness and engagement and results in enhanced app usability.
Fast performance and light loading
Compared to mobile websites, apps take much lesser time when loading and gives superior performance once built perfectly. Waiting repels customers, and apps with impressive performance and faster response will create a massive appeal among business customers.
A direct approach for customer retention
Mobile apps have a lot to with business growth since businesses can directly approach and deliver to customers in a way users most appreciate. Considering the power to leave users with delightful experience, mobile apps create an optimistic ground for retaining maximum customers. By means of push notification reminders, you can keep them engaged as well.
Apps are sales boosters
Mobile apps mean creating opportunities for increase in sales. Amazon and Netflix are a few great examples that have elicited enormous response, converting more customers than we could ever imagined. Since apps provide convenient facility of online shopping experience, developing a mobile app translates into terrific rewards and returns for businesses.
Better functionality and offline capability
Mobile app not only feature great custom functionality for each OS, but they can also integrate with local device environment. This is not possible with HTML based website. Mobile apps, if crafted to work offline, can support offline capability, which means users can use some of its functions and download its content without internet connection.
Cons
Premium resources
Depending on the project scope, development team to be hired is decided along with technology stack to go into building a high-performance app. Website building and modification does not impose as many challenges as mobile app development does.
Perfectionism
Not all mobile apps rolled out in app stores perform as expected. If done shallowly, the app may not result into proper brand awareness and marketing. A shoddy app can destroy the whole purpose. To avoid this disaster, perfectionist approach is needed.
Grand investment
To follow a perfectionist approach and make a native app that pampers customers, businesses have to pay more dollars than responsive website. Apps have certain features whose development does take a lot of time and grand investment though the end result is worthwhile.
The end of dilemma: The best choice
After above discussion, we finally come to the point where the dilemma culminates and the best choice surfaces. Businesses who can afford having customer interactions only through mobile-optimized web pages can continue to leverage the power of their web presence.
Alternatively, you can choose having a mobile app to directly approach customers for better customer experience and brand awareness. However, you must be confident that your mobile app investment will pay off in time.
The last option is having both at times? Successful organizations often capitalize on mobile apps and responsive websites since this approach opens doors to unlimited opportunities for business acquisition and growth.
A good number of people may already have ideas for an app or mobile app development Toronto they’d like to develop but due to the lack of skills to develop and market it, they simply just give up.
That’s exactly where iPhone 247 Labs.
In a nutshell, it will show just about anybody how to build or develop their own mobile app or game, share it with the world, and how to profit from it.
There are a lot of people out there who say that you can build your own app, but this is not entirely true.
Before you do anything, you should definitely consider hiring a professional Android app development company.
Your app will most certainly be high-quality and you won't have to worry about doing any work.
You'll simply hire them for their expertise and their work ethic.
One thing that you want to make sure of is that you are going with a leading Android app development company.
These companies will spend a lot of money on marketing and promotion and they might put in a bit more effort on making your app as well.
If you have an app that does not provide any interaction with or feedback to the user he will certainly be less interested in using it.
It will be like clearing the highest level of a game still not getting any score.
There have been several instances when apps have not been handling the traffic inflow as a result of affecting the business value for a longer period.Another aspect to consider when looking for a robust backend is scalability.
If you are looking to dodge mobile app startup failure, go for a product that is scalable.3.
You can, in fact, make effective use of social media and even ask your prospects to share responses and ideas about what they would like to include in the application.Build up a little excitement before the launch of the application like Apple does.
Launch events are also a good idea if you want the media to talk about your app.But then, make sure that your app meets the claims that you make.4.
An enterprise application framework is a software framework that allows developers to create enterprise applications using coding tools and various other subcomponents.
It is deemed one of the best enterprise development frameworks for cross-platform enterprise application development by the global developer community and enterprises.
The same code written in React native can run on Android as well as iOS.
Flutter's architecture supports rapid components rendering and provides the developer and the end-user with intuitive platform features like scrolling navigation, icons, etc.
Such components enable developers to focus on creating an application rather than building UI components from scratch.
PhoneGap Powered by Adobe Systems to render custom application development services and then handed over to Apache to maintain and keep it open source, PhoneGap makes this list of top enterprise application development frameworks primarily because it reduces the usage of complex coding languages such as Swift for iOS development and Java for Android development.
