App or website: What's best for your business?

Whatever else you decide, your website needs to work well on every screen size. That approach is called responsive design, and it's been the expected standard for years. If your site still struggles on a phone, fix that first, because it affects everything else in this article.

How often people need you is one of the biggest factors in this decision. If your business relies on people coming back regularly, an app makes a lot of sense. It sits on their home screen, one tap away, and that small saving in effort adds up over weeks and months.

Think about the apps you open without a second thought: maps, banking, travel, fitness. Uber, Strava and Google Maps all depend on people building them into a daily routine, and being on the home screen is a big part of how that habit forms.

Notification badges, the small counters on an app's icon, play a similar role. They give people a reason to come back, as long as what's waiting for them is worth the tap.

If people only need you now and then, to check opening times, book once a year or read up before buying, a good website will usually serve them better. It's easier to find and there's nothing to install. How often people visit isn't the only factor, though.

Apps are more convenient once they're installed, but they ask more of someone who's only just heard of you. A first visit almost always starts with a search, a link, a social post or, more and more often, an answer from an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini. All of those lead to a website. Very few people go looking in an app store for a brand they don't know yet.

That's why your website does the heavy lifting early on, and why your app needs a clear route in from it. We look at the different ways people discover apps in The App Store isn't the only way people will find your app.

Once someone has installed your app, the picture flips. Content can load from the device rather than a server, people stay signed in, and you're always within reach.

Put simply, your website wins before someone downloads your app, and your app wins after.

Websites can do far more with a phone than they used to. Most can now use the camera, ask for your location and let you sign in with your face or fingerprint using passkeys. So the real question is how far beyond that your product needs to go.

Apps still have a clear edge when a product depends on the device itself. That includes connecting to other hardware over Bluetooth or NFC, tracking location in the background, working with health and fitness data, and showing live updates on the lock screen or a smartwatch. On iPhone, websites still can't use Bluetooth, USB or NFC at all. Uber remains a good example: its whole service depends on precise, continuous location, which an app handles far better than a browser.

You’ve got big plans for a customer touchpoint that looks like nothing else on the market. It’s entirely unique and original. How do you realise this dream? By developing an app or creating a website?

Before we provide an answer, let’s acknowledge that there’s a reason websites and apps typically resemble one another. A standard format is easier to use. We intuitively understand where to look, what to click or tap, and how things work. But let’s go back to our entirely original (but definitely hypothetical) customer touchpoint. In this example, an app is the better option.

Generally, apps are more of a blank design canvas. Apps can be more free-form and are open to more creative design. Mobile websites exist within the restrictions of an internet browser. How you navigate a website is built into the browser (via the back and forward buttons, the search bar etc.) and experience conditions user behaviour. We tend to engage with browsers in the same way, following the same patterns and habits, no matter what website we visit.

Developers can design apps to reflect your particular aesthetic vision and to perform and function in a way that meets your business needs. Advanced touchscreen gestures allow for a more interactive experience and a wider “vocabulary” with which to engage users – you can swipe, drag, pinch and double tap your way around an app. It’s so much more expressive. On the other hand, your business model may not require that design freedom. If you'd like to see how the platforms themselves think about this, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and Google's Material Design are both worth a read.

In the modern business landscape, personalisation is increasingly important. It helps to tailor services to specific users, allows for bespoke product recommendations and enables you to deliver relevant content. Though both websites and mobile apps allow for personalisation, there are notable differences in how they do so.

Apps are far more open to customisation than websites. Users can dictate their preferences and set the app up to reflect the way they use it. Apps also track user engagement, allowing you to refine the content you push. By utilising geo-location features, they can even push location-specific offers and content.

Websites are by no means fixed – they also offer a degree of customisation. It’s just not as extensive as apps. Websites are very adept at collecting user data and harvesting the information that powers your analytics. However, they’re less flexible when it comes to delivering personalised experiences.

If personalisation is central to your product, an app gives you the most room to do it well. Android shows how far this can go. Its dynamic colour system, refreshed in 2025 as part of Material 3 Expressive, lets apps take on the colours someone has chosen for their phone, so your app feels like part of their device. Apple and Google also now let apps use AI that runs on the phone itself, which opens up smarter, more personal features without sending everything to a server. You can see how we approach this in our AI app development work.

Think about the moments your product is used in. Phones are brilliant for quick, focused tasks: checking a balance, approving a request, logging a job on site, or seeing what's changed since yesterday. Apps can go further still, with home screen widgets, lock screen updates and watch apps that put the key information in front of people before they've even opened anything.

Read our article: The Essential Guide to App UX Optimisation

If your users mostly sit at a desk working through detailed reports, a phone app might not be the first thing to build. Your website analytics will tell you how many people already visit on mobile and what they're trying to do when they arrive. That's a good place to start.

Many businesses choose between an app and a website based on initial investment costs and how complex the solutions are to implement. Far too many forget to consider the long-term maintenance spending required to support an app or website.

Apps generally need more ongoing care. Apple and Google release new versions of iOS and Android every year, and both regularly raise the standards an app has to meet to stay in their stores. Apple has removed older apps that haven't been updated for a long time, so leaving an app untouched puts your brand at risk. In practice, it's a choice between supporting your app or retiring it.

So weigh up what an app will cost to run over several years, not just what it costs to launch. Working with a team that supports what it builds makes those costs far more predictable.

Websites also need regular maintenance and support. However, it’s typically easier and cheaper to perform. Unlike apps, websites don’t require users to download an update or go through an approval process. Developers can make incremental changes. This ability to tweak the website and make subtle alterations can be extremely beneficial.

There's rarely one right answer for every business. Work through the questions above and you'll probably find that an app wins on some and your website wins on others.

Give each question a weight based on what matters most to your customers and how your business makes money. Nearly every business needs a website to be found. But if what you offer depends on regular use, the phone's hardware, reliable notifications or working offline, an app could be central to where you go next.

If you're weighing this up, it helps to talk it through with people who've seen it play out many times. We design, build and support apps for iPhone and Android, and every project starts with The Journey, our way of making sure an idea is worth building before anyone writes a line of code. Get in touch and we'll give you an honest view, even if that view is that your website will do the job for now.