We really love our Drupal at Pronovix, but sometimes when you want to offer the best possible mobile experience, it’s possible you need to get outside of the Drupal stack. It’s not an easy job to decide if you should go with a responsive site or have a dedicated app for your mobile users, so we tried to collect the factors that help you make a more conscious decision. According to Mashable
- 17.4% of all website visits came from smart-phones (tablets excluded) last year
- that’s a 6% traffic increase compared to the year before
So it’s not a question anymore that if you’re on the internet, you must take care of your smart-device users. But is it enough for your site - regardless if it’s CMS based or non-CMS based - to have a nice responsive interface or should you extend your site’s functionalities with an application? Anthony Wing Kosner’s (Forbes) opinion about the point of a mobile app is the following: "Apps give you the opportunity to present your products as solutions to your customers’ problems, even if only by suggesting that you are a master in the domain of that problem." So should you get one? Application downloads by Android and iOS users double each year in total comparing to the year before and this trend seems to be continuing. In my opinion if people are already using your website, they are most likely going to try out your application as well, as long as you offer it for free. You just have to make sure your app has got what it takes and your customers will switch to using it leaving your website behind. Otherwise the development cost is just money down the drain.
There are some clear cases where building an application wins over a mobile optimized website:
- If you are generating revenue from an app
- If it leverages the internals of the device such as the camera or GPS
- If you plan to send push notifications regularly
- If you need to upload content from your mobile device
- If strong authentication is required for your service, but you don’t want to make your users log in over and over again
Specifically for Content Management Systems you can build your app as if it was another front-end to your website that consumes the same content that is already in your CMS. Another important factor to consider is the development costs. A CMS powered application results in a ready to use back-end for your application. User management, content publishing? You don’t have to worry about it. And by using cool libraries like the Drupal iOS SDK for connecting the two parts together, development time decreases again. However a dedicated app of course doesn’t come for free, next to the development costs, there are significant maintenance costs. Once your mobile’s operating system or your site’s CMS version changes, you’ll need to make sure the changes don’t affect your application’s behavior. But depending on your use case the benefits can definitely outweigh the costs.
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/08/11/does-your-business…
http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/11/app-store-revenue/
