There’s no doubt that building a functional mobile site avoids the pain of having to build specific apps for multiple phone platforms. The big problem? End users would still much rather have an app.
Mobile phone picture from Shutterstock
Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith reinforced that point during the opening keynote at Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Sydney yesterday:
HTML5 versus the web is an oversimplified question. The answer is very dependent on the spin. Developers understand the technologies — but if you talk to the rest of the world that are not developers, they don’t understand and they don’t care. For consumers, it only matters if it’s an app they get in an app store. If they can’t have that, it’s a bad thing. Mobile web is a second class citizen.
In many situations, a a mix of native apps and mobile sites is likely to be the best solution, but resistance is likely if an app isn’t available.
Comments
3 responses to “Mobile Apps Still Beat Mobile Sites: Gartner”
Mobile websites suck. Even on a 3.5″ iPhone I’d rather see the full site and zoom in on what I want to see. Don’t give me some dumbed down experience with ugly menus and big buttons and piddly bits of information on the screen.
OTOH, if you are going to make an app, it had better be worth the space it takes up on my phone. Most don’t.
I don”t fully agree with the statement above that the general public only wants apps from the app store but no browser based html5 apps. For certain usage, e.g. local businesses like restaurants cafes etc. for example, hardly anyone would search for a native app in the app store. the natural conclusion is to just search for the name or a description of the searched business on Google. If you want to make a spontaneous reservation for a restaurant for the same night, who would search for an app in google Play or the App Store? Hardly anyone. Which is also why we are fully focussing our efforts at http://www.webapptool.com on enabling html5 web app building without requiring coding knowledge.
How can that possibly be true!? He doesn’t think people surf the net on mobile devices!?