Every entrepreneur wants his potential customers to know about his services and products, tell them about what he offers, what promotions he holds and do it in the most convenient way. In the early 2010s, this was achieved by the widespread adoption of adaptive layout, which allowed you to view websites on devices with different screen resolutions, but everything flows and everything changes. Nowadays, the big step is the development of mobile applications for your business , whether it is the development of a mobile applications for ordering food from a cafe, selling various kinds of goods or convenient registration for car service services. A mobile application is a high level of accessibility for the client, a high level of loyalty.

Why do you need a mobile application for business?

Doubt whether you need an application, especially if you already have a website. Did you know that 42% of all purchases are now made on mobile devices? Do you always go to turn on your computer for shopping and ordering services, or do you use your mobile phone, which is always at hand? So how to be? To answer this question, let’s see what problem or task we want to solve by releasing a mobile application. In this case, it is the availability of your business from the client’s mobile device to be always there. There are two ways to solve this problem:

• website support for mobile devices;
• mobile app.

In general, currently, no one considers the creation of a mobile application as an option that excludes the development of an adaptive website, this would be extremely stupid in the realities of our time, but still the best option is their union. But no mobile version will allow you to expand the functionality as much as a mobile application. Fast camera scanning, geolocation, payment with just one touch. 

There are two ways to organize support for mobile devices by a website: adaptive website layout (Bootstrap as an example) and mobile version of the site (RESS).

Responsive website layout

This is the cheapest and easiest option for solving our problem, but there are several points: you have one design and one functionality that “adjusts” to a small resolution of a mobile device, you perform a similar number of database queries and, for the most part, download a similar amount of resources , which often will not even be displayed to the user, which will definitely reduce the speed of his work on mobile devices, and clients, like Yandex and Google search robots, will not thank you for this. 

Mobile version of the site

This is a more expensive and difficult to maintain website. You separately develop 2 versions of design and functionality. Depending on which device accesses the site, it is determined which blocks of content to return, which queries to the database to make, and which client will receive the design and functionality as a result. This is the correct, if I may say so, option for displaying your site on a mobile device, but at the same time it is more expensive and difficult to develop and further support, due to the need to work on two versions of the website. 

Mobile app

With regard to adaptive layout, it is expensive to create and maintain, but it does not stand out much compared to the mobile version of the site, while giving great functionality: this is especially fertile ground for marketing. No wonder statistical studies have long argued that users prefer to spend more time in applications than on mobile versions of sites. We will talk about this later. 

What are the benefits of creating a mobile application?

The advantages of mobile applications are just a lot and it is quite difficult not to evaluate them. We will start with  personalization , because thanks to authorization in the application, your client is always with you, you can always make him an individual offer that will take into account his interests. Another very important factor is the overall feeling of the client from working with the application : your brand becomes more significant in his eyes, the speed of the mobile application is higher, better stability, in comparison with the same website. All this gives your client a completely different, better experience of communicating with your company. Your logo, your brand will become more recognizable. Imagine how often you look at the screen of your device? Your customers, having installed the application, will stumble upon it quite often, and your logo, your company will settle in their bosom. The most spectacular advantage is the presence of  PUSH notifications : these are  free mailings to all your customers , which they are unlikely to miss, which you can always resend, track who opened them and who did not, draw conclusions about the effectiveness of advertising (notifications) at each stage . You will not let the client forget that you are there, that you have something to offer him. You can always inform the client about an abandoned cart, a discount on a product he has previously viewed, notify him about the upcoming work (whether it is a car maintenance or a haircut in a salon). So, if we put everything together, then mobile apps are better because :

1. Because you are always in touch with your customers.
2. Because the design was originally designed for a mobile phone.
3. Because they are more convenient to use thanks to gestures and gadget capabilities.
4. Because it is possible to implement work with the application without the Internet.
5. Because the application can be “taught” to adapt to each user.
6. Because for identification it is now enough just to put a finger.
7. Because it speaks of the high status of your company.

Not a little “because”, right?

Who exactly needs to order the development of a mobile application?

Definitely not every business needs to develop a mobile application. Of course, any functionality can be pulled by the ears, but will it make sense and will the investments pay off (not necessarily in money, perhaps in reputation) – this is a good question that you should think about before starting work. 

Here, who may need the development of a mobile application to a greater extent, is a business that regularly interacts with a client: food delivery, cargo transportation, subscription services (utilities) and so on. Why should a cafe have its own application? What is the need for its development? Getting to the first pages of search results is quite difficult and expensive, and fighting there is even more expensive. By developing an application, you rise to a new level of competition: the client does not have to do anything to stumble upon you. It’s like a cafe that is located in your house, no, no, and you will go there for lunch.

Another case is if you need functionality that your website cannot provide: here the list is quite extensive, but almost all of this functionality has one thing in common – the user does not need to be currently in a running application to use its functionality, unlike from the site to which the user should go. You can track the user’s location in the background (of course, with his permission), notify the user of the need to perform this or that action, communicate important information for him for free, and on devices that may not even be connected to telephone communications, such as tablets. 

What are the mobile app development options?

Currently, only two operating systems for mobile devices remain alive – these are iOS and Android. From here, two options for developing a mobile application grow:

• native development,
• cross-platform mobile development.

Let’s consider these two options in more detail.

native development

Native applications  are programs that are created for a specific platform, Android or iOS. It is understood that native development uses the development languages ​​recommended by the manufacturer and standard, original tools of the operating system itself without any additional programs. This approach allows you to use all the capabilities of a particular platform as efficiently as possible, deeply integrate it with the system itself and provide high speed.

In the case of native development, you will need to develop two applications: one for iOS devices, the other for Android devices. Hence the disadvantages of this approach: the high cost of development and the high cost of support.

Cross-platform development

Cross-platform development saves you two applications by combining them into one using special tools that allow you to run it on different operating systems. This will greatly reduce the cost of developing a mobile application, but it will also add its limitations, both in functionality, and in its speed and appearance. Often, when developing a cross-platform application, you can stumble upon a functional limitation of a particular tool, which will take quite a lot of time, effort and money, which makes the difference in cost not so critical. It is worth noting that the development of a cross-platform mobile application is more suitable for fairly simple applications. It is often impossible to use cross-platform mobile applications for complex systems, and if possible, this will cause a lot of difficulty and complexity in support (of course, if you plan for a long life of your application). In fairness, it should be noted that cross-platform development does not stand still and tools such as Flutter are getting closer and closer to native capabilities and performance, but at the expense of more expensive generalist developers, because you need to perfectly understand two mobile systems at once.

I hope that this article will help you take the first step towards developing a mobile application, understand whether your business needs it or not, what problems it will solve, what options for mobile applications exist and how they differ. 

If you want to  order the creation of a mobile application  or get expert advice – write or call us, we will be happy to help you!