Mobile Site vs. Mobile application

Mobile websites and Mobile applications service different functions

Mobile Application Benefits?

Why use a mobile application and not just a mobile website?:

• A mobile application can cache information and save it for later use, i.e when the user is later in the underground without coverage, or for quicker access when showing friends. Imagine you are waiting for your friends and look up a film at the cinema. On WAP this will be a 20 to 50 page experience, each one taking 10 seconds to load. A cinema application would find this information in seconds and could be revisited even quicker when you want to book with friends
• A mobile application can store configurations, like train times and look them up at certain times of the day. So you train application could look to see if there are delays on the underground while you enjoy breakfast and alert you if there are problems. With WAP you will actively have to look for these. These can be done with WAP, but only via the mobile operator, with the user's permission, and the profile is based on the SIM, not the user.
• Sharing is easier. The stats and research from my experience with the Nokia Mobile Festival Guides, is that people like to share and send links, but each peer group has vastly different phones on different networks. So for example, Orange Wednesdays is great for the 3 friends on Orange, but what about the others? Also different people within any peer group, even 14-24 year old music fans who go to festivals, all with phones newer that 8 months old, had vastly differing operating systems, screen sizes, manufacturer and therefore browser capabilities. With a mobile application, the content that is seen, and the content that is forwarded is optimised for each phone, and even if the user does not have the application, they can be sent an MMS with a map and the cinema details. mobile web 2.0, or even mobile web 3.0 does not allow for this.

Mobile Application disadvantages, advantages of using a mobile browser:

Mobile applications are not the holy grail. For example, at the Mobile Internet conference, I was on a panel with Miles Ross, of IPC media. IPC Media has so many different publications that an application may be too restrictive. Applications best suit a purpose very well, so the BBC and FT could use an application to fine tune what their users want and what they look at on the move. The whole Pearson group as a whole would not have an application for all its publications. Other disadvantages are:

1. No ability to run 3rd party analytics. You can see much more and learn much more about the user, but you will have to build the analysis tools yourself
2. No SEO, content on an application cannot be trawled. This is not necessarily and issue, and many mobile sites are a mirror of the main site with liposuction and a script to tell search engines not to search it in order to not create seemingly duplicate content.
3. No simple mobile advertising revenues, unless you serve ads into your application, something that you will have to build yourself. However, once built, these ads could be worth more.
4. limited linking, you do not want users clicking out too much of the application, as there is no programmable "back" or "return" key to the application, so a CPC or CPA advert would be seen as potentially end of session.

To know more about this contact me to discuss.

Back to top | Comment | Contact

originally posted by Christian Borrman 20:43pm 10/11/06, last updated 17:52pm 13/05/08

Contact / Comment

Contact | Comment

©Copyright 2001-2008 Christian Borrman, All Rights Reserved. Reproduction Prohibited