In the second part of the Denver App Developers series on Approaches to App Development, we will discuss the Web App approach to mobile development.  Just to be clear, we are not talking about a hybrid web app running in a web view container.  In this section, we’re just discussing a plain vanilla web app running within a mobile browser.

Web apps are an outstanding choice to expose data from an API or a traditional application as long as the requirements are not to heavy.  If the application will create, retrieve, update and delete data in a simple fashion, this may be a good approach. By including mapping features, tightly-coupled push notifications, expert camera features or the like, you’re probably stretching the bounds of a web app, and should instead consider a native mobile app to create an ideal user experience.

That said, there are quite a few advantages of web apps over other application formats.  Since web apps are hosted in a browser like Chrome, Firefox or Edge, a web app is immediately available for use by navigating to a specified URL, there is no need for the user to download the content from an app store.

Another advantage of a web app is accessibility in the SEO realm.  A web app can be indexed well by Google or Bing; therefore, titles, keywords and descriptions can be surfaced related to your application.  Conversely, with a native mobile app, search engines can only scrape your app description for keywords.  

Lastly, web apps are budget friendly.  At CodeDenver, our Denver app development team has been building web apps for almost 2 decades and have successfully delivered quite a few budget-friendly web applications.  Reach out and say hello.