The Mobile Web vs Mobile App Debate

The mobile web vs mobile app debate has been ongoing. Some argue that the mobile web is the future, others are in favor of mobile apps.

I personally find this debate somewhat tiresome, it's like asking; what's better, cars or trucks? The answer, they each serve a purpose.

From a functionality perspective, although HTML5 has made great strides to support offline content with hooks for geo-location and camera capability, it's still tough to rival a well designed native mobile app. Take Google's Gmail mobile web version, it has set the bar as to what's possible via a mobile web browser. Would I choose it over Apple's native Mail app on the iPhone? Not likely, in fact I'm writing this blog post as I fly from Frankfurt to Madrid by emailing myself a draft using the Mail app on my iPhone. As for Amazon's mobile web version, it's a good example of a well designed mobile interface, clean and easy to read with expandable content. In this case, it serves my purpose for comparing book prices while I'm out shopping.

From a company's perspective, with limited budget and time, you need to ask how you can best utilize your resources. If you want the widest reach and target the most potential users, perhaps mobile web is a good option. But again, that depends on what features you want to provide. Are you offering free or paid content? What is your target audience? How can you best deliver the desired functionality?

From a user's perspective, I'd actually like to have both options. I appreciate Gmail's mobile web version if I'm checking my email on a friends phone, but still prefer the native Mail app on my own device. It's hard to ignore how easy the App Store has made searching for and installing both free and paid mobile apps. Although searching Google in a mobile web browser is also pretty easy, I don't have the luxury of reading user reviews or viewing screenshots of your search results. You're also left with the uncertainty whether the webpage you visit will be mobile friendly or not. Mobile Safari does offer a rich user experience, but I would still prefer a mobile friendly page over having to pinch and zoom, especially if the site has a lot of unnecessary graphics slowing the page load.

Another option which is sort of the best of both worlds, is using a cross platform mobile framework like Titanium, PhoneGap or RhoMobile. Develop one app and publish it to multiple mobile platforms. It however, is not a silver bullet. Do you want a consistent user experience across all platforms? Or do you want the user experience to be familiar with the target platform? It's an important question to ask. For a company, it would be easier to provide technical support for a consistent design. But for a user, do you really want your iPhone app to look like a scaled Blackberry app? Will the user say, "wow I love how this app looks exactly the same on both my Blackberry and iPhone"? Or will they say, "this app looks strange and feels different than all my other apps"? There are also risks with cross platform frameworks. One, its common for them to be behind the native OS development cycle, so you may not be able to support the newest OS features. Two, what happens if that cross platform framework discontinues development? It could mean your next version of the app is a rebuild from scratch.

If you are just serving content, perhaps exposing the data in a consumable format may be enough. Even though every newspaper company is scrambling to release a mobile version of their site, I personally would rather read that content in my own RSS reader, rather than have a separate mobile app for the New York Times, Globe & Mail and Huffington Post.

So in the end, what's better, mobile web or mobile apps? That depends ;)