There are many businesses who still think that so-called old school websites are enough to serve their digital footprints than mobile applications. Though a website could be the only digital presence of a business two decades ago, it is no longer the same.
Since users now mostly interact with online businesses through mobile apps, having a mobile app has become more important to ensure brand dominance than ever before. While 89% of users like to access mobile apps, just 11% prefer websites.
Naturally, the demand to turn websites into mobile apps is pretty high now. But, before you hire a mobile app development company for the purpose let us explain the key reasons for turning websites into mobile apps and the ways to do it.
Why Turn Websites Into Mobile Apps?
For turning a website into mobile apps there are several convincing reasons for businesses to consider such a move. Here we explain a few of them.
● Wider Access To Audience
Since the mobile app is preferred by most users who access the digital services and the web through mobile, an app can easily open for you a larger market and ensure reach to an expansive audience.
● More Scope Of Personalization
Since smartphone devices by their very nature offer an immense scope of personalization, mobile apps too can grab a fair share of this personalization to address individual user needs and preferences.
● Fast-Paced Operation
Mobile apps unlike websites are designed leaner by using native platform-specific technologies and hence offer better performance and faster speed. When it comes to carrying out specific tasks, mobile apps are far more superior to websites.
● Offline Access
Unlike a website a native mobile app can be accessed offline or when the network connection is not available. The changes and new inputs are updated online as soon as the device is again connected to the internet.
● Uninterrupted Communication With Users
Mobile apps staying on the device screen all the time can communicate with the users through push notifications and in-app messages throughout the day in an uninterrupted manner.
● Enhanced Visibility
As various studies found, an average smartphone user at least spends 2 hours using mobile apps and naturally, your app has a better chance of getting visibility and traction than websites.
● Knowing User Needs and Preferences Better
Since native mobile apps can stay active in the background throughout the day, it can grab more information about user habits, behavior, and preferences than the websites. Naturally, mobile apps offer more ways to grab user information and insights than websites.
Most Effective and Time Tested Ways To Turn a Website Into a Mobile App
Now when it is about the ways to turn a website into mobile apps, you have several time-tested methods at your disposal. Here we explain a few of them.
● Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
The best thing that a website can do for delivering an app-like user experience without really disturbing its web interface is to embrace the Progressive Web App (PWA) technology.
PWAs refers to the technology that allows a website to appear like a native app with a home screen quick access icon, push notifications, offline access, faster loading time, and closer integration of device functionalities.
Most important of all, Progressive Web App (PWA) can also help a business rank higher in the search engines while offering an app-like interface and experience.
● Cross-Platform Mobile App Development
This is the most popular approach that allows building one single app to work on multiple mobile operating system platforms including iOS, Android, and also the desktop web.
Some cross-platform app development technologies besides allowing you to use maximum code across all platforms also help with the better integration with the native features and functionalities and thus can ensure a comparable native app-like user experience.
Some of the leading and most cross-platform popular mobile app development technologies that are widely used for developing apps across iOS, Android, and the web include React Native, Flutter, Ionic, Xamarin, VueJS, and few others.
Both React Native and Flutter are most preferred for cross-platform development because of their capability in delivering a native user experience while allowing optimum reusability of the code. While React Native has already been used across too many successful mobile apps across the niches, Flutter in recent years has risen as another great alternative with distinct performance advantages.
● Native App Development
Finally, there is nothing like building native apps for each mobile OS platform separately. Native app development helps you to build an app for multiple operating systems like Android, iOS, and also the Web. You need to hire Android developers or iOS developers for building Android or iOS apps.
Just because a native app built specifically for a native platform can easily integrate the local device and platform-specific features, in terms of user experience and performance they are far better than cross-platform apps.
But when it comes to the cost of development and the time consumption, native app development is more challenging, especially for small businesses, startups, and app projects with huge budget constraints and the need for faster development.
Another major challenge corresponding to the native app development approach is the requirement of expert developers for each mobile platform. For example, native Android app development needs developers with expertise in either Java or Kotlin and for native iOS development, a project requires developers with expertise in Swift or Objective C.
Apart from the challenges of higher development cost, longer development time, and the need for rigorous expertise with each platform, native app development offers the advantages of various modules and extensive libraries to deal with a multitude of development issues.
Greater scope of personalization, faster performance, better App Store, or Play Store presence, and smooth user experience are the key advantages of a native app development approach.
What Is The Right Development Approach For You?
Now reading up to this you may be confused about making the right choice and can still find it difficult to cope up with the challenges of converting your entire website into a mobile app. But wait, you can take one problem at a time. First, think whether at all you can afford to build native apps for each platform separately. If not, consider a hybrid or cross-platform development approach, and finally, to make the most of the web with an app-like user experience you can always opt for PWA.
But wait, we have not finished yet. There is still another approach that can offer you a sense of relief. You can build an app as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with just the basic and elementary features and user experience attributes and further can add more features as per user feedback.
This incremental development approach will help you maintain a low budget at the initial stage while you can develop it to a fully-fledged app over time. This approach will also help you reduce complications and build a product validated by user feedback.
Conclusion
Lastly, you need to invest considerable time and money in developing a new app that involves considerable risks. This is why it is highly advisable to convert the website into an app through the professional web and mobile app development company with proven expertise and track record in similar projects.
