Have a look at your own phone. How many apps have you opened this month? Now count the ones you downloaded for a single booking, used once, and never touched again. They're still there, sulking on page three.
That's the fate awaiting most business apps, and it's why "we need an app" deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Sometimes an app is exactly right. Often, a well-built mobile website does everything your customers need, for a fraction of the cost, with none of the app store friction. The trick is knowing which situation is yours before the money leaves.
A properly built responsive site isn't the cut-down consolation prize it was ten years ago. Accounts, forms, bookings, payments, location, camera uploads: all available in the browser. A customer taps a link from a search result or a message and they're using it immediately. Nothing to install, nothing to update, and every visitor always sees the current version because you deploy centrally.
For discovery, occasional transactions and content-led journeys, that zero-friction access wins almost every time. It's why our website work treats mobile as the primary experience, not a shrunken afterthought.
An app is strongest when people come back frequently and it makes a repeated task meaningfully easier. A focused signed-in experience. Offline access when the signal disappears. Push notifications that people actually want. Deeper use of the device itself.
Our mobile app for Jones International is a good example: their coach holiday customers return again and again, and having their bookings, updates and details one tap from the home screen genuinely improves the journey. Frequency is the keyword. An app that's used twice a year isn't an asset, it's a maintenance bill with an icon.
How often does the same customer come back? What's the task, and does it get easier with an install? Would they honestly grant you a place on their home screen? And, the one everyone forgets: what operational system sits behind it? An app is a front door, and it's only as good as the system it opens onto. We looked at what that involves in our piece on booking systems, and every word of it applies whether the front door is a browser or an app store.
For most businesses, the right sequence is: build the mobile website properly, watch how customers actually behave, and add an app when the returning-use pattern proves itself. That way the app is an answer to demand, not a hope that demand appears.
If you're weighing this up for your own customers, bring us the numbers you have and the hunch you're working on. We'll tell you which side of the line you're on, and we won't sell you an app your customers won't install.
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