Have a great app idea? Don’t waste your money.

The best piece of advice I can give to people who approach Bad Dinosaur to have their brilliant app idea turned into reality, is that when it comes to prototyping, the web is the place to be. Most people approach us wanting to build a mobile app — that’s no surprise, considering it’s what most people think of when they have their great new idea. But what people typically don’t realise, is the increased investment in time and money required to produce a mobile app compared to a web app, and how small the differences are when it comes to the end product.

This is usually where I see a bit of a blank look on the entrepreneurs face as they try to calculate exactly what the difference is between the two… and so starts the awkward — and slightly more technical — conversation where I explain the difference between phone apps and web apps, and why they should go for the latter rather than the former, when they’re building the first version of their idea (their MVP, or minimum viable product, as well call it).

So here’s a brief explanation, without too much techie stuff:

Anyone with experience in phone app development will tell you how slow and painful it is compared with web development. And yes, there are now frameworks that allow some kind of hybrid webby-appy solutions that fall somewhere in between — but I’ll avoid getting too into that for now as it’s another article worth writing one day. For the ‘normal’ on the street, it’s easier to explain the first part of ‘why’ using simple economics of supply and demand:

There are currently far more freelance web developers in the world than there are mobile app developers.

You know what most entrepreneurs and early stage startups have very little of? Money. Money goes further building on the web because freelance rates are more competitive and thus lower than mobile app developers. That small nest egg of cash you’ve been saving to turn your idea into reality needs to stretch as far as possible as you iterate over your idea, trying different things, a change here and there, a pivot to the left — all of which costs time and money.

On average, features on our web apps are estimated at around half to a quarter of the effort than their mobile app counterparts.

Across all the features you’re looking to build this can be the difference between affording to change and adapt your product on the fly, or having to take another few months to earn more money to pay for the changes. The same list of features you’re looking for will take 50–100% more time on a mobile app whilst also costing you substantially more per day. Not to mention scarcity also playing a part in wait times for a mobile app developer to build it in the first place.

And the result? Well, with the web you’ll able to have your most recent and up to date version in front of every early adopter using your product/service, as you develop it. Each small change can be instantly deployed and put in front of your audience. In mobile apps, you’re relying on the end-user to update to the most recent version — something which gathers more and more technical debt the longer you have it out there for (as there’s no guarantee someone will update their app, you have to keep all the parts in place to support that version for, basically, eternity). This small difference has a really big impact when it comes to early stage ideas — where you’re iterating fast and building new and exciting things for your users. At this stage, waiting even a few days for the new version of your app to pass through an app store approval is enough to cripple you, let alone taking on the added technical debt.

Mobile responsive has come a long way, meaning web apps can almost feel entirely like an installed mobile app, without a lot of the hassle. As with most things, it comes down to what type of app you’re looking to create to see if the web can be the right place for you to start. Based on the clients who have approached us in the past, it’s rarely the case that it can’t be built on the web and have the same look and feel for their MVP.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for mobile app development — which is why we offer Xamarin, cross-platform solutions at Bad Dinosaur (build once, deploy across iOS, Android and Windows Phone!) — but we feel this is only necessary once you’ve iterated through a few versions of a web app first, tried and tested your design and UX, and have stability in your product or service. This is pretty much the ethos of the prototyping and MVP process here at Bad Dinosaur. This approach can save you thousands at the early stages of your idea and potentially be the difference between gaining traction and running your own business, or going back to your permie job.