It seems like more and more sites are getting aggressive about trying to get people to install their apps. This includes things that work fine in web browsers, and don’t have any obvious need for an app. Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just focusing on making their site work well, instead of having a site AND an app to worry about? What’s the benefit?
In: Technology
An app can do push notifications to your phone to get your attention when there’s new content they want you to know about. The website version of that is where they try to get you to sign up for an email list and hope you’re not just routing them straight to your spam folder.
It depends on what the purpose of that website is.
For example – for a bank, having an app, which is sandboxed, solves a lot of issues from security perspective.
For a shop with an app – you can do lots of things that on web are crap, but on mobile are useful – like the use of camera for example, or ability to really step up the loyalty experiences for their customers – waving your loyalty QR code on the app is much easier than going through the pain on having actual vouchers or codes printed and sent via post. An app can keep you logged in when you use the same device over and over again…
For some businesses it’s cheaper to have an app than a mobile-optimised website. So they will focus their dev resource on updates to two streams – mobile and pure web (maybe with small mobile modifications if devs feel like it, but wouldn’t be as smooth as m version).
These are some of the reasons why the apps are being pushed so much. Do you have any examples of what annoys you specifically?
I don’t install apps and it’s one of my pet peeves. That’s what the browser is for and 99% of websites don’t need an app. I suppose that marketing research shows that people are more likely to keep opening an app than navigating to a website. Especially if the app gains privileges to show notifications.
1. Once you install an app you are less likely to use another service as it forms habits.
2. With an app they can get know more about you.. your location, device and so on, making it easier to market to you.
in addition to what others have said, about tracking and habit forming, apps get two very powerful abilities– they can send notifications, and they can get data via pushes from a central server, mobile websites cannot do either.
this let’s them send out notifications, either enticements (sale on now, new offers available, etc) or functional (your pizza is out for delivery, your package was delivered, you have a new deposit in your bank account, etc)
Metrics. While it’s not a very important one, investors for example do look at those kinds of numbers to assess the value of a company.
Native apps are also faster than a website in your browser. Mostly because the native app’s code is compiled once (on the programmer’s computer) and then just executed (on your phone), where websites use JavaScript, which is compiled every time it is executed (both on your phone).
Missing features is surely another reason, since browsers don’t support everything yet; but if you look at the [WebAPIs](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API), you see that many things you’d expect an app to be able to do are already possible in the browser; e.g. use Camera, show notifications, use Bluetooth.
On a side note: What do you mean by “getting aggressive”? Because there is a relatively new feature to “Install” the website you’re looking at. That would just add an icon to your menu/home screen and potentially make the website start in fullscreen, but you would still be using a browser and the website. [This is how that looks like](https://mdn.mozillademos.org/files/16281/chrome-desktop-a2hs-banner.png). Maybe that’s what you are seeing more and more now?
Latest Answers