We build mobile apps. We also talk people out of them about half the time, which is a strange thing to admit on a services page and saves everyone a lot of money.

What decides it is whether anyone will install the thing. An app is the only channel where a customer has to actively agree to let you onto their phone before you can say a word to them, and that agreement is expensive to get. Almost nobody budgets for it.

Four signs the answer is no.

If the app is your existing pages in a wrapper, you have built a slower route to the same content plus two app stores to keep happy. A progressive web app puts the icon on the home screen without the review queues.

Frequency decides whether it survives on the device. Something people open weekly can earn its place. Something they need twice a year gets deleted the first time the phone runs out of storage. Booking a table, checking an order, paying a quarterly bill: all better as a fast mobile site.

The real reasons to go native are camera, GPS, offline use, background sync, push notifications, and payments that need the hardware. If none of those are on your list, the case is thin.

The install budget is what kills most projects, and it kills them after launch when the money is already spent. Building the app is the cheap part. Getting people to find it, download it and open it costs more, continues forever, and rarely appears in the plan. We have watched a well-built app launch to forty installs because the strategy was “we will tell our customers”.

There are cases where an app is clearly right. Field teams working without signal. Anything where the camera is the product rather than a feature. A service people touch several times a week. Push notification as the reason the thing exists rather than a box someone ticked. Those are worth building properly and we enjoy building them.

The middle path is usually a fast mobile site now and an app when there is evidence of demand for one. Heavy use of your mobile site is that evidence. If it is not there, an app will not create the habit on its own.

We would rather build the thing that works than the thing that was asked for. It costs us a project now and then and it is still the right trade.

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