What is the benifit of an app over a mobile web site? Seems to cause more trouble...

[wpcautobot]

Hi Dan, I've been wondering, what is the benifit of an app over a mobile web site? Apps seems to cause more trouble than they are worth in that:

- Platforms lack apps (W10M, I'm looking at you)
- Developers have to worry about making them for different platforms)
- Most apps require an internet connection anyway.
- HTML 5 is so feature rich it seems it can do anything an app can.

... I'm sure there are more, It just seems to me that platform as far as "app" availability is an issue who's time should be over and OS's could exist without the worry of apps altogether.

Thanks!

~ Joshua (wpcautobot)

 

[Zachary Boddy]

The benefits of an app include a more condensed and focused feature set that's uncluttered by a browser's controls, the ability for an app's services to utilize specific functions of a phone that a web site is not able to as easily (such as accessing the camera or internal hard drive), a potentially more data efficient experience, faster performance, better battery efficiency. There's a lot of benefits to using an app, as they're unhindered by the boundaries set by a website and are able to use the specific tools of whatever operating system they're using (such as UWP for Windows, or the use of Live Tiles or Widgets).
There's a lot more differences but that covers the basics.

 

[wpcautobot]

Zac,

That was kind of you reply. You are correct about all those things, some more than others. I guess I was looking for at least a couple reasons in favor of webapps vs local apps, like those I made. It would be a nice article especially since Google is doing the hosted app thing soon.

Thanks!

 

[gchand05]

I've wondered this as well. Do the Progressive web apps coming to Android have a place on Windows 10? Developing apps costs a lot of money and a lot of these apps could be web apps because they don't need to be standalone. amazon and FB mobile websites function very similar to web apps I believe and are great.