Taken as a whole, the app market is huge, and all types of businesses are keen to get a slice of the pie. But is a mobile app a good idea for a small business?

The lure of the app

Aside from the ‘new and shiny’ and ‘everyone else is doing it’ aspects there is plenty to recommend building a mobile app for your business. People get very attached to their phones and creating a direct route to your business with no browsers or search engines in between can foster an incredible customer loyalty.

The use of other phone data (such as location) can also provide fantastic opportunities for interactivity as well as gathering user data (think of how much data retailers using loyalty card style apps can gather). It’s a great way to cross the digital/real life divide.

Drawbacks of apps

It’s not all good news on the mobile gravy train though. Building a bespoke app is prohibitively expensive (price tags in the tens of thousands are common) and takes a long time. Given how fast technology is moving, once you start development, there’s no guarantee someone won’t get there first.

If you’re building an iPhone or iPad app, you also have to pass Apple’s stringent criteria to enter the iTunes app market – something you can’t be sure of until you’ve finished development and submitted it.

If you do get it out, there’s every chance no one will even notice. Without the right publicity, your app will just be an anonymous drop in the ocean (a drop representing five figure development costs).

Alternatives

As a small business owner, you might conclude that it’s just not worth it. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t, or can’t, tap into the growing mobile internet market.

Mobile friendly sites are much cheaper to build and don’t have the same update problems – if it’s XHTML compliant, it will continue to be so. They are also cross-platform compatible.

If you’re desperate for an app, there are cheaper, albeit more limited, ways of doing it. Google ‘build your own mobile app’ and go from there. Or try Google’s App Inventor to create an Android app for free.

Image Credit: Guillermo Esteves

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 9:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.