App or website? How to tell which one your business needs

We build native apps for iPhone and Android as well as websites, so we get asked this a lot. Most of the time the answer is a better website. Sometimes it really is an app. Here is how we tell.

Start with who comes back, and how often

A website is for people finding you: someone searching for a roofer, a tint shop or a vet, who may visit once and call. It has to be fast, clear and found. That describes most small businesses’ customers most of the time.

An app is for people who already know you and come back every week, or every day:

• families checking a school calendar and the lunch menu,
• members booking classes or checking the schedule,
• crews or staff looking up jobs, forms and contacts,
• regulars ordering the same thing again.

If you can’t name a group like that, you almost certainly need a website, not an app.

What an app can do that a website can’t

• Tell people something right now. Push alerts land on the lock screen: a closed day, a changed time, an order that’s ready. People choose which topics they want, and they should be able to turn them off.
• Live on the home screen, one tap away, instead of in a bookmark nobody finds.
• Use the phone: the calendar, the camera, location, Face ID. A school app can put every event on a parent’s own calendar in one tap.

If none of those matter to your customers, an app is a website that’s harder to update.

What the app stores cost

Putting an app in the stores has fixed costs on top of building it, and both accounts should be in your business’s name, not your developer’s:

• Apple: the Apple Developer Program is $99 a year.
• Google: a Google Play developer account has a one-time $25 registration fee.

Both stores review apps before they go live, and again when new versions are submitted. Apple’s TestFlight lets a small group of real users try the app before it’s public, which is how we test ours.

How we build them

We write one app in React Native and Expo, and it runs natively on both iPhone and Android. Staff update it from a web console with roles and approvals, so posting a notice doesn’t need a developer. It collects no logins or personal data it doesn’t need.

Right now we are building a communications app for a school, on iPhone through TestFlight, with its first group of testers. It has a calendar people can add to their own phones, alerts by topic, and an assistant that answers questions only from what the school has published.

The website still comes first

An app only helps people who already have it. Everyone else meets you through search, and that’s your website and your Google Business Profile. So we build the site first, make it good, and add an app when there’s a group of people coming back who would use it every week.

If you think you might be there, here’s how our app work runs, or tell us about it and we’ll give you a straight answer, even if it’s “not yet.”