logo
logo
Sign in

From Website to Mobile App – Your Four Best Options

avatar
Oleksii Shevchenko
From Website to Mobile App – Your Four Best Options

n MVP strategy is all about figuring out how to get users to pick up your product, validate product/market-fit, and jump-start the iteration process. Later, when you’re getting traction you can focus on delivering a compelling user experience; but in the beginning, it’s all about getting that initial user feedback.

In this article we’ll help you think of an MVP as an efficient mechanism for getting a virtuous cycle going between value creation and data collection. Remember, as a strategic entrepreneur optimizing for scarce resources, in most cases your best bet is to opt for the most practical solution. Pssst…web apps )

Recalling ‘Lean Startup’ Principles

If you’re getting a tech company off the ground and your business doesn’t directly relate to smartphone features (e.g. a smartphone’s camera or microphone), it might make more sense to start developing your customer with a web-based MVP (Minimum Viable Product)—i.e. a ‘web app’ hosted in a browser like Chrome or Safari. Believe it or not, these can actually reach more users than mobile apps—and as browsers become increasingly functional, their capabilities are growing fast.

While the business case of an app like Uber or Instagram depends directly on device features and functionality (geolocation), there are many other products out there that don’t need to interface with mobile APIs; and thanks to responsive web design, these applications can benefit from additional screen real estate, a more convenient mobile typing experience, and the cross-platform accessibility afforded by web app design.

These days the tech options for mobile app development available to entrepreneurs are abundant. The main differences between them come down to implementation speed, cost, and final product quality. Understanding the differences between themas well as the various approaches to implementing them—is the tricky part.

It’s possible that the shortest distance between your MVP and the customer feedback you need to get your business going may well be a web app, rather than a native app. So let’s unpack four popular mobile app technologies that will illustrate the common differences among them. These will help you identify the most practical way to validate your business idea and facilitate its concomitant product development.

Progressive Web Ap

Web Apps: Turn Website Into App - EzeTech

This relatively new technology developed by Google enables mobile devices to add a website or web application to a smartphone’s home screen and be able to interact with it offline.

To turn a regular web app into a progressive web app you just need to add a home screen icon, web application manifest, and service worker that allows the site to work offline and load faster, as well as to send push notifications. Note that when you load a progressive web app in your phone’s browser, it prompts the device to add the site to the home screen. Currently progressive web apps are not fully supported on iOS devices, but hopefully this will change in the near future.

Pros
  • – Allows for push notifications
  • – Apps can work in an offline mode
  • – The underlying sites usually get better ranking on search engines
Cons
  • – This technology is just a browser wrapper—not a fully-functional app, so technically it’s still a website
  • – Users won’t get a native app experience (i.e. interactions, animations, performance) as the  UI is just a fullscreen browser window without a URL bar that can work offline.
  • – Poor compatibility (still not available for iPhones and iPads)

It’s worth mentioning that the Washington Post was one of the first media companies to use a progressive web app to extend the reach of their website. Progressive web apps are a great way to supplement a website or a web app, extending its reach. They have the potential to drastically improve the global user experience with devices that support them; however, since this technology has yet to reach mass adoptions, it should be considered as an additional means of extending the reach of a website, rather than as a way to convert a website into a mobile app.

Web Apps: Turn Website Into App - EzeTech

Hybrid Mobile Apps

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a framework that enables developers to build mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Web Apps: Turn Website Into App - EzeTech

Applications built using Apache Cordova work in a built-in browser environment (WebView) on different mobile platforms (Android, iOS) and can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play Store. They come with an icon that exists on the home screen and they can interact with smartphone hardware APIs to enable functionality of device features (geolocation, camera, etc).

Worth mentioning: The user experience of an application built with this framework  is not going to be as smooth as it would be on a native app. The look and feel of the interface is similar to that of a website (i.e. 300ms click delays, phantom clicks while scrolling, etc.). Of course there are modules and frameworks that offer UI components designed to be similar to native apps, but these still fall short compared to the native experience.

The text above is a summary, you can read full article here.

 

collect
0
avatar
Oleksii Shevchenko
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more