Mobile Web vs Native App

If you are planning to establish mobile presence for your business then you end up in building mobile application. There are two popular ways to build mobile application.

• Create a native mobile application for users to download from app store/play store
• As a web application which can run in mobile browser

We all know users are spending more time in native apps when compared to browsing app via browsers. Engagement of the user is high in native app via push notification even if the app is closed and provides a clear visibility via app icon present in home screen. But even with all this only top 3 native apps takes the complete attention of every user. Survey on android says users are spending 80% of their time only in top 3 apps. Other native app developers end up in spending more money in distributing their app to compete with these top apps.

On the other hand, chrome on android gets an average of 100 sites per month but only 1or 2 native apps is getting installed per month by a average user. We have is huge potential to easily reach users via mobile web.

The above graph is given by comScore which says reach in mobile web is 3X more than native apps. Even though mobile web sees many more new users than native apps, at the end native app captures the user attention by engaging them(right side graph). We do have draw backs in native app when comes to development and acquisition cost. We need to build and deliver apps based on individual mobile OS’s like Android, IOS, Windows.

Lets conclude, If you want to maintain a single code base for Web/Mobile, easily maintained, shared between users and option to build SEO to make it visible on search engines then mobile web application should be your logical choice.

On the other hand if your app needs to access other native apps like user’s contact, phone storage, native in-build functions then an native app will be required.

Note: We have new beast called PWA which is gaining lot of attention among the startups, which is build over best of both the native apps like user interface, reliability, engagement and best of web apps like fast deliver, maintainability, SEO etc.,

In my next article I will be taking about why we need Progressive Web App and how it helps mobile web application in reaching heights.