There is a fine line between deciding whether to build a mobile 'app' or a mobile-enabled website. Here are some of the considerations that will influence this decision:
| Consideration | App | Web | Why | Importance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | ✖ | ✔ | Web costs less - App developers can be expected to charge a premium for experience in emerging technologies. Building and testing apps for multiple platforms takes more time. | High |
| Risk | ✖ | ✔ | Apps are high risk as the technology is less well understood and is changing faster. There are multiple devices to build for and vendors are immature. | High |
| Latency | ✔ | ✖ | It is faster to operate an app than to wait for web-pages to load. | High |
| Maintenance | ✖ | ✔ | Apps require multiple versions to be supported. | High/Med |
| Deployment frequency | ✖ | ✔ | Web changes are immediately available to users. Apps take some time to publish. Cost may preclude frequent deployments. | Medium |
| Phone features | ✔ | ✖ | Apps have full access to phone features including sensors. | Medium |
| Commerce | ✖ | ✔ | Web commerce is more mature than the cloud-services that apps typically integrate with. | Medium |
| User population | ✖ | ✔ | There are many more web-enabled phones than smartphones. | Medium |
| User interface | ✔ | ✖ | Apps can be more intuitive and make use of phone-specific gestures. | Low |
| Data persistence | ✔ | ✖ | Apps can persist data locally where the network is unavailable. A requirement may be to persist frequent sensor readings. It would be more efficient to hold these locally and upload later. | Low |
Other factors that may impact a decision are:
Turtle Technology can assist you in making the right investment.
