I get a lot of clients requesting an “App” and I can see that most of the visitors coming to my site are searching for an “App Developer” but not everyone is aware of the difference between mobile apps and web apps.
From a clients point of view, you might not be thinking about what technology to use, maybe you want a staff app to make your business more efficient, or perhaps a customer app so that they can better manage their services. You probably aren’t thinking “I need an iOS developer with 5 years of Swift experience” and a direct line to the AppStore review team, you probably just want something that does the job.
From a developers point of view, mobile apps and web apps are completely different beasts.
A web app can be published by anyone, to the interest internet, often in a single afternoon of furious “vibe” coding. A mobile app on the other hand is more like a piece of embedded software that can be incarnated onto a physical device with expertise, skill, and the right hardware.
Once the “app” has been developed and tested, there is an even more arcane process to get it published into Apple’s “walled garden” App Store.
If your app does anything even remotely interesting, the review team will interrogate your pedigree, business model and intentions. As if you were asking a pastor for an introduction to his daughter.
Then when it is published and available to download you MUST ensure constant support, frequent updates and compatibility with old versions. Let this lapse for more than 6 months, and you are likely to be removed from the (usually more libertine) Android play store.
For these reasons, unless your business model absolutely relies on a native mobile app, I would almost always recommend that clients build a progressive web app first to prove the idea.
Once the idea has been proven and validated, one of three things will happen: A. the web app will work so well that you realise you don’t need a mobile app. B. The web app will provide so little value that there would be no point in building a mobile app. C. The web app will be such a wild success that you will have investors lining up to throw money at the mobile app build.
Either way, it’s almost always better to spend $10,000s and weeks on a web app than $100,000s and many months on a mobile app for the first version.
My honest opinion.
