To App or not to App

I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and reading this article in the Guardian about the fading novelty of news apps for the iPad got me thinking. I have frequent discussions with clients and industry colleagues about the suitability of the closed app format for everything.

Everyone wants to be on the Apple or Android app stores for “positioning” reasons. Marketeers love imagining their logo sitting permanently on the tablet’s main screen. But applications are expensive things to build, need to be heavily customised for different platforms, have hurdles for quick fixes and updates. Your customers won’t download your app just because you’ve built it, or even because they love your brand. Or they might even download it along with dozens of other free apps which they install and hardly use.

I see apps as a possible solutions for certain customer offerings. But you need to define the offering and the value to your customer and your business. And sorry, an App it’s not an offering in itself, let alone a mobile strategy.

The downloadable app format gives you an incredible array of interaction possibilities, which are great for tools, games, social networking and resources which people are going to use often, demanding rich functionality, willing to take the time to discover the cool new interaction possibilities you’ve worked so hard on. But sometimes the best solution for sites offering mostly web content is surprisingly… the web – customised for different mobile platforms of course.

Define the service offering, assess the value, then decide on the technology, interaction and presentation.