Original Written date: 2023
Everyone is building mobile applications nowadays. All startups have an amazing idea for a mobile app. What’s even more annoying is when you go to a shop they always ask “do you have the app installed for points”? 10 years ago it was “cards” now it’s “mobile apps” The Important question for a developer and company is: Do you really need a mobile app?
No, in most cases you DO NOT NEED TO BUILD A MOBILE APP! It’s actually contraindicated to build one.
I remember back in 2016 during my Cyber Security study I learned about PWA’s (Progressive Web Apps). The statistics about mobile apps usage back then were staggering. For the top 100 apps had more downloads, installs and usage, than the combined rest of the apps together in the whole store! More than that, mobile apps lose 80% of their users within the first days!
The Security Aspect
Mobile Apps are also more prone to viruses and are known to run backdoors into your system. Most people do not realize this and thus install many apps
Costs of developing mobile app Average cost of a IOS/Android developer is $54/hour for the developer’s salary alone.
This doesn’t include the company costs, profits and the cost of other auxiliary team members such as backend, devops, QA, management etc. This average doesn’t include seniors. The full hourly price might be near $150.
A simple app can cost between $38.000 to $91.000. The price increases as the complexity increases. + In the past there were more than 10 mobile operating systems. Most of them died out. Today we’re left with 2 main platforms Android and iOS. You can expect to double the initial price for those 2 platforms.
To make things even more complex, you’ll often lose customers if you have NO website and just a mobile app Or a simple website which only offers a download button as people using desktop, from a mobile browser or from anyother device will not be able to use the app
You can instantly triple it if you also have a web app which does the same thing.
Cross platform apps
There are systems such as Cordova, ionic or react native which makes it more feasible to build a mobile app once and run it on multiple platforms. However, there are hidden costs and considerations to take into account such as the need for a server, backend, devops and hidden complexities of such systems.
The Solution - Build a Web App Instead
The solution to building too many mobile apps which wont’ be downloaded or used is to build a web application instead.
This will make the application available via any web browser on any device. More than that, you can enhance it with a PWA progressive web app to make the application available offline
This solution effectively lowers complexity and costs from nearly $300.000 to less than $50.000 for the web application!
When it makes sense to use a PWA instead
When does it make sense to build a progressive web application instead of a mobile app? Almost all of the time you don’t require native functionality. This is 95% of the applications which exist online.
- Simple interaction websites
- WEb shops
- CRUD apps which only hold some data Nowadays, you can even use sensors such as GPS, acceleratometer via the Web. Even the camera can be used via the HTML API.
When to consider NATIVE
These are probably the only use cases to consider building a NATIVE mobile application
- If you need real hard time calculations which would make sure of the native hardware
- When you’d need to access all internal sensors which are not available on the web api
- Want full offline support for long periods of time +
- Want to store large amounts of data on the device +
- May consider using advanced 3d gaming capabilities
For all other things go with a PWA You’ll save money, time and energy.
Conclusion
Don’t jump into building a mobile app unless you have a huge budget