“As of this writing, there’s no contest: ship mobile apps if you can afford it.” – Jakob Nielsen

When I woke up this morning, I was overwhelmed by the number of times friends were Tweeting, Facebooking, and emailing me the newest post by Jakob Nielsen, “Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift.” Ninety-nine times out of 100, I agree with every word he says. This article is the one exception.

While I agree with his basic premise, that if given the option between equally well-developed native apps and web pages, the apps often are superior, there are some serious caveats that need to be pointed out before such a blanket statement is made.

Why Apps?

Before I begin, I have to point out that I believe there are valid business reasons and use-cases for native apps. They are:

1. Games and other complex apps that need to be written in a non-web language.
2. Situations where offline storage exceeds the HTML5 browser limit of ~5MB.
3. Functionality that requires mobile OS API access that isn’t possible through the browser.

I am sure there are more, but these are the only circumstances that I have come across requiring a native app instead of a website.

Jakob disagrees. He starts off his post by asking a very important question, “But if your site happens to have decent appeal to mobile users, then the second strategy question is: Should you produce a mobile website or develop special mobile apps?”  His answer, in the short-term, is MOBILE APPS! These are the main reasons he outlines:

1. Native apps can target the specific limitations and abilities of each device.
2. Mobile devices offer an impoverished user experience, and native apps can more easily make up for those weaknesses.
3. Native apps offer superior business case by giving businesses a micropayment ability (app stores).

These reasons all look good from the surface, but I have some very serious issues with them from a web developer’s perspective.

Pitfalls of Native Code

While it is true that native apps can more specifically target the strengths and weaknesses of each device, that implies you are going to develop a separate native app experience for each device. If that’s your plan, you are faced with developing native apps for iOS (fragmented into separate phone and tablet experiences), Android (the same), Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 Metro, WebOS, Blackberry (both BBOS and BBX), and Symbian.  Jakob goes even further to say the fragmentation of the UI on Android devices (such as the Kindle Fire) actually requires a different UI for those devices. That brings the total native app count to at least 11.  You can imagine how quickly the costs to create and manage that size of an app portfolio can get out of control.

The alternative is splitting your development budget between the most popular platforms and relegating the other users to a mobile site. Not ideal. The idea that only 70% of users will be able to use those apps means you’ve completely abandoned the other 30%. It forces you to choose (and then advertise) which users you think are the most important. This makes your users choose between the platform they want and the information they need. Again, not ideal.

Responsive Design Is the Answer

This problem is solved rather quickly by employing a responsive design strategy: One site for one web that works on every device for every user.  Jakob outlines this as a strategy for the future in his article, but I am not sure why it will work five years from now and not today. At VistaComm, responsive web design is already an integral part of our design strategy. We have one responsive site that we’ve already deployed for a client that relies VERY heavily on iPads and smartphones for its traveling sales team. Another one is in the final design phase, and two more contracts are signed. Responsive design isn’t the wave of the future; it’s the wave of the present (you can read more of my opinions on responsive web design in a couple of guest blog posts here and here).

A responsive design gives you so much flexibility, while also opening up your content to 100% of users. There are no limitations, no provisions, no playing favorites. By designing responsively, you are finally admitting that the fracture between the “mobile web” and the “full web” was always a superficial one. For too long, we’ve accepted the premise that people using a mobile/tablet device didn’t want the same content as desktop users. Now, we have the technology to distribute our content across every platform, every form factor and every screen size. We can meet users where they are, rather than obfuscating what we (often incorrectly) decide is “less important” behind truncated copy and “FULL SITE” links.

To go ahead with what Jakob is suggesting means we are accepting a delay in this progress. Andy Clarke (@malarkey on Twitter) refers to native apps, and to a lesser degree mobile sites, as “mobile-optimized device ghettos.” We are locking our content into the hands of a small subsection of users, which ultimately hurts the users, the business, and the web as a whole.

Clear Logic

There is empirical proof of my assertion. Take a look at The Daily (iPad only app) vs The Boston Globe (responsive website). If every iPad owner on the planet subscribed to The Daily, they would have about 30 million subscribers* (a lot). If only 10% of the internet users worldwide subscribed to The Boston Globe, they would have over 300 million subscribers* (a lot more)! That’s a 1000% higher number of people using The Boston Globe site, and they’ve just begun to scratch the surface of the Internet’s potential*.

Moral of the story: While the usability for individual users can be better on native apps, the restrictions involved mean they are completely unusable for a very large portion of the public, and thus they are more unusable as a whole. A responsive design is the economical and responsible choice for almost every use case.

*These numbers are educated guesses, nothing more.