Mobile App vs. Mobile Web

First off, let me start by saying: I work for a Fortune 100 company and this is my personal opinion.

I work in the consumer division at my company doing software consulting. Right now we're prototyping a mobile app for some of our web users. It's actually more of an experimental proof-of-concept item right now, falling under a pseudo-budget we have for "innovations". This past year one of the big initiatives I've been trying to champion at work is this concept of innovations and creativity within our team and this mobile app project is the latest figurehead of those efforts. Our development team has taken it upon themselves to create a mobile solution that we believe will add business value and create sales opportunities for our company.

So far we've only been able to work on this mobile app project in bits and pieces. Since we don't have a proper budget for innovations yet, we've had to work on it during our down time and off-hours. That's set to change soon, as our stakeholders have finally recognized the benefits of innovation within IT and are planning on adding an official Innovations budget in 2010. I'm excited to see what our team will be able to produce next year as we expand on our efforts to create business innovations through the use of technology.

Our team is excited to play around with mobile technology right now, especially since we're hoping to launch a version of our mobile app on the iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms. We're trying to develop a successful prototype by the end of the year, but we haven't really been able to allocate that much time to development lately and we've been hampered with some mobile platform issues (especially on the iPhone). I've had to scale back the expectations of the prototype to our business partners and I'm generally worried about what we'll be able to deliver by the end of the year. This weekend I was thinking about the larger approach to our project and kept asking myself over and over: Should we be building a mobile app or focusing on a mobile web solution?

Is our team pushing this technology just for the sake of technology? At our company this is one of the business owners' biggest concerns with our IT department... and the reason why I think our team has had such a hard time earning credibility in our innovation efforts. Too often our team gets caught up in trying to use the latest technology or software release without really thinking about the actual benefits of that technology. We're all about trying to use the latest and greatest, even though we can't quantify what we'll gain through the adoption of the latest and greatest. It's something I'm keenly aware of and I always stress to my team that we *have* to show the business value behind our technology if we hope to gain real traction with our business partners.

So, should our team build a mobile app or focus on a mobile web solution? How can we best serve the mobile needs of our consumers? Our devs are excited to work on mobile apps because it's something that personally interests them, but is that the best way to go? Here's a quick rundown of a (native) mobile app vs. a mobile web solution on the iPhone (courtesy of O'Reilly):

What is a Web App? [Mobile Web]
....A web app is basically a web site that is specifically optimized for the iPhone. The site content could be anything from a standard small business brochure site to a mortgage calculator to a daily calorie tracker–the content is irrelevant. The defining characteristics of a web app are that the user interface is built with web standard technologies, it is available at a URL (public, private, or perhaps behind a login), and it is optimized for the specifics of the iPhone. A web app is not installed on the phone, it is not available in the iTunes App Store, and it is not written with Objective-C.

What is a Native App? [Mobile App]
In contrast, native apps are installed on the iPhone, they have access to the hardware (speakers, accelerometer, camera, etc.), and they are written with Objective-C. The defining characteristic of a native app, however, is that it’s available in the iTunes App store.

The O'Reilly website lists out the pros and cons to each approach, from functional hardware access to ease of deployment. For us, the pros of going with a mobile app are essentially just access to all the cool hardware features of the device. The cons list is much longer though: develop using Objective-C, develop on a Mac, lengthy Apple approval process, cumbersome bug fix process and slow development cycles. For a mobile web solution, the pros for us are: develop using current tools, develop on current platform, bug fixes in real-time and a fast development cycle. The cons are lack of access to all the cool hardware features and loss of sophisticated UI effects.

After reviewing all the pros and cons and the business requirements I honestly don't think we need to go with a native mobile app. Sure, we'll be able to deliver a cooler application if we go with a mobile app, but I don't think it's worth the hassles of going native. We're already dealing with native platform issues and there are major concerns over deployment and maintenance in the future. So far our team has turned a blind eye to these items and we've taken a "we'll figure it out later" attitude, but I think it's time we take a serious look at our approach and reconsider our solution. We can't just force a mobile app solution because we're all super excited to work on the iPhone and Android. You have to use the right tool for the job, and right now mobile app technology is not the right tool for our job.

Sigh, I guess I'll have to be the bad guy at work this week. Hopefully our team won't be too crushed when I tell them we'll have to scale back the "cool" factor for our mobile solution.