Why are Mobile Apps better than Websites?

In this post you will know Why Mobile apps are better than websites. A mobile app is a software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer. We currently live in a world where everything is digital. Today, most of us own smartphones. There is suddenly an increasing demand for mobile apps. The demand for apps is at an all-time high now. They are typically available through app stores which are operated by the owners of the mobile operating system. Mobile apps can be used to buy music, pay bills, play games, sending messages etc. Let us have a look at the battle between apps vs websites.

Mobile Apps pros and cons

A mobile website is usually not a separate website, it’s a responsive design that works for all screen sizes. Mobile visitors should be able to access most of the content you have on your full website, but in a way that is optimized for smaller screens.

Pros:

1) They can be faster. No browser overhead of CSS and HTML and JavaScript hacks, just pure native UI elements retrieving precisely the data they need to display what the user requests.

2) They use simple, native UI controls. Rather than Imagining whatever UI designers and programmers can dream up, why not pick from a well-understood palette of built-in UI controls on that tablet or phone, all built for optimal utility and affordance on that particular device?

3)Simply put, mobile apps allow for companies to develop more interactive ways for the user to engage with their content. Rather than reading blocks of text, or looking at static images, apps can integrate features will enable users to interact with components of an article or website.

4) They make better use of screen space. Because designers have to fit just the important things on 4-inch diagonal mobile screens or 10-inch diagonal tablet screens, they’re less likely to fill the display up with a bunch of irrelevant noise or design flourishes. Just the important things.

5) They work better on the go and even offline. In a mobile world, you can’t assume that the user has a super fast, totally reliable Internet connection. So you learn to design apps that download just the data they need at the time they need to display it, and have sane strategies for loading partial content and images as they arrive. That’s assuming they arrive at all. You probably also build in some sort of offline mode, too, when you’re on the go and you don’t have connectivity.

6) There are a number of ways you can take advantage of SEO benefits to ensure that your app ranks highly on search engines. It is often thought that in-app content is overlooked by Google, but that is not the case.

7) Mobile apps also provide additional uses and features that are not available on mobile websites. The most significant of these is their compatibility with a devices’ hardware and features.

Mobile apps can take advantage of native device features like:

Push notifications

Tap-to-call/email

Device vibration/ alerts

Image uploader (camera)

Instant and automatic updates

Cons:

Extra expense – while some apps are affordable ($49/mo for example) it’s still another cost

Extra setup – you have to setup the app and submit to the app stores.

Major Problems with Mobile Websites:

1) Small screen size – This makes it difficult or impossible to see text and graphics dependent on the standard size of a desktop computer screen.

2) Lack of windows – On a desktop computer, the ability to open more than one window at a time allows for multi-tasking and for easy revert to a previous page. Historically on the mobile web, only one page could be displayed at a time, and pages could only be viewed in the sequence they were originally accessed. But Opera Mini was among the first allowing multiple windows, and browser tabs have become commonplace but few mobile browsers allow overlapping windows on the screen.

3) Navigation – Navigation is a problem for websites not optimized for mobile devices as the content area is large, the screen size is small, and there is no scroll wheel or hover box feature.

4) Lack of JavaScript and cookies – Most devices do not support client-side scripting and storage of cookies, which are now widely used for most Web sites to enhance the user’s experience, facilitating the validation of data entered by the page visitor, etc. This also results in web analytics tools being unable to uniquely identify visitors using mobile devices.

5) 

• No push notifications
• No offline access
• No app store presence
• Poor design can cause problems like:
• Performance issues
• Cluttered design
• Poor usability

Although a mobile app functions a lot like a mobile website. A mobile app can be closed or inactive, but still, work in the background to send geo-targeted push notifications and gather data about customer’s preferences and behaviors. It’s also much easier to access a mobile app than a mobile website. So Apps are winning in the race right now.