Mobile Website vs. Mobile Apps. Which is best for your organization? Before you answer this, it’s important to understand the difference between Mobile App and Mobile Website. Both are accessed on smartphones and tablets.

Mobile Website

It is similar to any other website in that it consists of browser-based HTML pages that are linked together and accessed over the Internet. Like any website, it also can display text content, images, videos, etc. And also access mobile-specific features like click-to-call or location-based mapping.

Mobile App

Mobile apps are applications that are downloaded and installed on your mobiles or tablets, rather than being rendered within a browser. Users have to visit Apple’s App Store or Android’s Play Store in order to find and download apps for a given operating system.

So what are the key benefits of mobile apps?

1. Better Personalization

   Personalization means meeting the customer’s needs more effectively and efficiently, making interaction faster and easier, increasing customer satisfaction. You’re used to a personalized experience when you visit Amazon, Netflix. Mobile apps can let users set up their preferences at the beginning, based on which users can be served with customized content. Apps track user engagement and use that as custom recommendations and updates to the users. Apps also use location in realtime to provide geography-specific content. When users are pampered with personalized content, they have a higher chance of making a conversion.

2. Instant access - Online or Offline

   It is the most fundamental difference between a mobile website and app. Though apps also require internet connectivity to perform most of their tasks, they still offer basic content in offline mode. Many apps can be accessed offline with updates being stored locally on the device until it reconnects to the internet. For example, if you want to edit an image, you can do that offline in an app but you can’t on a mobile website.

3. Native features available for App

   Mobile apps provide additional uses and features that are not available on mobile websites. Or if they are available on websites, they might offer limited access and integration with mobile devices is not efficient. Mobile apps are compatible with the device's hardware and features. Some of the native features for mobile apps are push notifications, tap-to-call/email, alerts, image uploader(access to camera), etc.

4. Freedom in Designing

   After all the technological advancements in web designing also, mobile websites have to rely on browsers to perform some functions. They depend on browser features like ‘back button’, ‘refresh’, ‘address bar’. On the other hand, mobile apps can be designed with a lot of functionalities and gestures like ‘tap’, ‘swipe’, ‘pinch’, ‘hold’, etc. For example, with a swipe gesture user can move to a next or previous step.

5. Users spend more time on Apps

   Research shows that mobile users spend 86% of their mobile time on mobile apps. Average time users spend on mobile apps has increased by 21% in 2015 from 2014. Though users spend a majority of their time on gaming apps and social media apps.

6. Apps can work faster than mobile websites

   A well designed mobile app can perform actions much faster than a mobile website as it stores data locally on mobile devices and websites retrieve data from web servers only. Also mobile websites use javascript code to perform most of the functions and mobile apps use the framework that is almost five times faster than javascript code.

7. Increased SEO potential for your In-App content

   There are a number of ways you can take advantage of SEO benefits to ensure that your app ranked highly on search engines. App indexing allows search engine crawlers to index your app content via deep links. It might be possible that apps rank higher than websites. You need to take care that you’ve provided some details of the app properly in the app store like App Title, Category, Description, Keyword Field, Developer Account Name.

Conclusion

Developing both a mobile website and app for your business can prove to be a costly affair. You need to choose one of the two channels, based on your budget and business goals. Both have their pros and cons, mobile apps, especially, can help you get higher conversions.