Mobile site or app? With Progressive Web Apps you can get the best of both
How quickly your site loads has greater repercussions for your business than just pleasing impatient customers. So which is the better bet: an app or a site? Lisa Bora, head of mobile at Google Australia, talks us through it the options.
Do you loathe waiting for a page to load on your smartphone? You’re not alone.
In fact, 29% of smartphone users go elsewhere immediately if a site is too slow or they can’t find the information they need.
For brands this has real consequences. Google data shows shopping-related searches increased 120% in the last year.
The answer to whether you need an app or a mobile website isn’t an easy one.
Brands who want to make the most of mobile likely need both- but they definitely shouldn’t be replicas of each other – each should have a distinct role and its own success measures.
Statistics show somewhere around 80% of time spent on mobile web is through apps, so they’re clearly preferred by consumers and companies with good apps will attest to them dominating in terms of usage, shifting brand metrics and ultimately driving sales – when compared to their mobile website.
However innovation to make mobile web experiences better is certainly welcome as there are too many terrible mobile web experiences out there – and from some of the world’s most famous brands.
A few other comments on the article:
1. Only poor responsive web uses the exact same images and files on all devices. So the mobile site, if designed/developed well should be much lighter and faster and tailored to the mobile user and use cases.
2. The innovative features of progressive web apps (homescreen icon prompt, offline and notifications) don’t work on the Safari web browser which is default on Apple devices
3. “Working offline” just allows you to view pages/content again that you have already opened, nothing new as it still needs a live web connection for new content
4. Progressive web apps require https (securely encrypted pages) which very few sites – including Google’s – have adopted completely. See https://httpswatch.com/global
So these progressive apps are a step in the right direction and better mobile web experiences will certainly benefit brands, but they’re in no way a replacement or substitute for native apps. Indeed they should be considered ‘as well as’ and not ‘instead of’, and only after you have sorted your mobile website and native app experiences.
The answer is: have both
THE answer isn’t to have both – AN answer is to have both. Which then presents the same issue people were faced with before responsive design: both a desktop and mobile website to content management = double the resources required, time, money, etc. Not ideal.
Another answer is to make sure your website is optimised properly to provide a mobile-friendly user experience. Even if you’re not designing “mobile first”, if you pay attention to everything from trimmed down (non-bloated) CSS, decent web serving, images that aren’t just output “for web” at 72 dpi but then crunched further using any number of image crunching apps or services.
It’s a start in any case.