Should I develop a mobile app for my web application?

Should you think about building a mobile app to sit alongside your web application? Here are some reasons why it might be a good idea:

1. It makes sense when you want to collect data with tablets and you've got poor or intermittent wifi access. You can collect data with a web app running in a browser on a tablet as long as there's a good internet connection. It's more difficult where the wifi signal is patchy - maybe you're on a factory floor surrounded by large pieces of machinery. A mobile app makes sense in this scenario because you can build in data caching - you keep collecting data even when the signal drops out and the app re-syncs with your database in the cloud when the signal comes back.


2. You've got colleagues out on the road who currently capture large amount of information on paper forms that they transfer to a web application when they're back in front of a PC. The argument here is that you encourage colleagues to use the app rather than paper because it saves time and gets information into your database faster - you can build and optimise a mobile app for fast data entry.


3. You want to collect evidence with the camera (or other underlying hardware on the phone like GPS and the accelerometer) on a mobile device and then store it in a database for later use. We've built mobile applications for clients who want to use the camera on a tablet as part of an auditing/inspections application. They take a photo, it's uploaded via the mobile app to the cloud and is immediately available to other users of the wider system. Integration with the device camera is easier through a mobile app.


4. It costs less than you think to design and develop a mobile application. The latest mobile development tools make it relatively easy to build a forms based mobile app (certainly no harder than web development). Code that your developers might have built for the web version of your application can also be reused.


5. You can get cross device support - you don’t have to build different mobile apps for different mobile platforms. Development tools like Apache Cordova make it possible to design and develop one application that then runs across multiple device platforms. This is important - it means you don't have to develop separate applications for iOS and Android; you can develop one application that will run on both an iPhone an Android phone. Ongoing maintenance and support costs are going to be lower too if you're managing just one application.

Bespoke mobile apps built with toolsets like Cordova can make a big difference to any organisation that wants to collect information from the factory floor or out on the road. A carefully designed mobile app with multi platform support can be a cost effective way to improve data accuracy, speed up response times, provide a proper audit trail and even cut paper storage costs.