Website or app?

Benedict Evans has written the most sensible take on the mobile-friendly website versus mobile app debate I’ve ever read:

Do you have the kind of relationship, and proposition, that people will want to engage with it enough to put your icon on their phone? If the answer to this is yes, then you should have an app - if only because the app store is the way to do that that people understand, and they’ll look for you in the app store. Once that app is there, you can leverage all the interesting and sophisticated things that you might do with it, or you might manage the flow of information just like your website, but the app has to be there.

If you don’t have that relationship, then all the clever things you can imagine you could do with Apple or Google’s new APIs are irrelevant and your strategy should focus on the web (and social).

Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. It’ll help you have much better, more thoughtful conversations with your clients, business leaders, and other people who make decisions around this stuff.

Hat tip to Rian Van Der Merwe