Aptus Consultants

"High road" or "Low road"?

To find your route, you must first decide your destination. So decide the sort of mobile service you should offer, and you will know which technology to use, right?

Perhaps. In practice it may not be that easy.

A client of ours started out with a mobile app for compelling reasons, but ended up with mobile internet instead.

At the outset our client identified that the key value of the service they offered was timely notification. To do this they wanted the user's mobile phone to buzz, play a tune, flash or do something that would grab the user's attention.

You can't do that in a mobile phone browser, so they strode on up the "high road" of developing and releasing a mobile app.

Pretty quickly it became apparent that getting the app onto phones was not easy for a whole bunch of reasons (this predates the iPhone), but the client persevered and after a lot of hard work, ingenuity and mobile app releases enough people were getting the app onto their phones and using it to make the service a success.

Then some bright spark suggested knocking up a mobile internet version for the users who couldn't get the app. A quick stroll down the "low road" to check out the view.

Well, our client discovered that their audience liked the view from the "low road". Most users weren't too bothered by timely notification after all and the quick little mobile internet version knocked up in days instead of months rapidly overtook the mobile app, which was eventually dropped.

So is the moral of the story "always take the low road"?

No.

However a mobile app does require a considerably bigger investment in time and resources than mobile internet, which means it is quicker and easier to experiment with the latter than with the former.

The key reasons to go for the bigger investment include:

• more engaging user interface such as animation
• access to mobile device facilities such as GPS, camera or the motion sensor
• users are used to paying for apps

The key reason to stick with mobile internet is really the low investment cost and the speed with which you can update the service.

Dig out those boots and get hiking!