The Importance of Mobile Web Sites and Mobile Apps
With the rush to develop mobile apps, enterprises often overlook an equally important piece of mobile technology — mobile-aware web sites and web apps. Enterprises do this at their own peril, though, because there’s increasing evidence that customers use mobile web sites and apps as much or even more than a company’s mobile apps. Read on for details on both the importance of mobile web sites and mobile apps.
New research done by Nielsen for CodeFuel found that when it comes to consuming content, consumers prefer the mobile web to mobile apps. Some 23% prefer using a mobile phone’s browser, compared to 15% who prefer using mobile apps. Fourteen percent prefer using a tablet to get the information. And 48% prefer getting it via the web on a laptop or a PC. Although a laptop or PC is still the preferred source, if you add up tablet use, app use, and mobile web use, mobile devices are preferred by 52% of people.
Other research backs up the primacy of mobile. StatCounter GS found that mobile phones are now more popular for accessing the Internet than are desktop PCs, by a 4% margin. In October, 2016, the company found that for the first time, Internet usage by mobile devices and tablets exceeded those of desktops worldwide. That month, it said, mobile and tablet devices accounted for 51.3% of Internet use worldwide, compared to 48.7% by desktops.
Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, warned, “This should be a wakeup call especially for small businesses, sole traders and professionals to make sure that their websites are mobile friendly. Many older websites are not. Mobile compatibility is increasingly important not just because of growing traffic but because Google favors mobile friendly websites for its mobile search results.”
What to Do About Web Site and Mobile App Development
This puts companies in a quandary. It’s time-consuming and expensive enough to try and write and maintain mobile apps for both Android and iOS. But having to also do the same for a web site and web app makes things that much more difficult.
The answer: Use a cross-platform development tool that lets you build an app for both the web and mobile apps. Just build it once, and then deploy it to multiple places. That’s what Alpha Anywhere does for you. It handles both front end and back end, letting you build simple or complex web apps and mobile apps.
See how you can create iOS apps, Android apps, Windows apps and standard mobile web apps from a single code base with Alpha Anywhere.
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