It’s time for publishers to stop building apps: here’s why

I’m tired of Apps.

I think it’s time online publishers stop building apps and focus more on building responsive sites that gives their users the best mobile experience available.

Mobile accounts for 80% of South African web traffic

I live in Cape Town, South Africa so my view on the ‘PC vs Mobile’ debate may be different to yours. It’s no longer a case of mobile starting to overtake Desktop traffic. Mobile is by far the biggest traffic source for almost all online publishers in the country, with 80% of my own property’s traffic coming from the mobile site! App traffic simply can’t compete with that.

What I still find difficult to understand is why online publishers feel the need to build mobile apps instead of building truly responsive mobile sites. My gripe with these apps is that they don’t serve the purpose they were designed for, which is to give the user the best and most convenient mobile experience.

Short life-span and small user-base

I download my fair share of apps and the life cycle of most apps are extremely short. Generally I will download an App, use it for a few days/weeks before the push notifications irritate me enough to delete the app.

Apps that I continue to use on a daily basis are the ones I find useful/productive likeEvernote, GeckoBoard, Chartbeat, and Social apps like Instagram, Twitter and Path to name a few. When it comes to publisher sites, I find opening my iPhone’s Safari or Chrome browser much more convenient than navigating through the various apps. Sadly very few sites offer a premium mobile site experience. For that experience publishers want you to go to the App store, download their App, go through an often confusing set-up process which usually results in receiving push notifications that you have no interest in.

Difficult to monetise, expensive to build and resource heavy

Thousands of dollars are spent on building native apps across the various platforms (in most cases only iOS and Android are catered to), despite the fact that majority of South Africans are still using BlackBerry’s and feature phones.

This also makes monetising the apps very difficult. Unlike start-up/tech apps, the end game is not to be acquired by Facebook or Google. In order for publishers to monetise their apps they need a significant number of users/downloads. Building native apps also means that you have to allocate resources to maintaining and supporting the App on each platform, another costly expense.

A quick look at the Top 100 apps in the App Store shows that there is not a single Online Publisher on the list. Not even the NY Times or BuzzFeed is able to beat Top 100 Apps like Foodie Yama or My Talking Tim (don’t worry, I’ve also never heard of these Apps before)

I think this shows us that there’s a fundamental difference in how users consume news content on mobile devices, and what they look for in an App. It’s way easier to get the latest NY Times story via somebody posting a link on Twitter/Facebook, or even by going directly to the site on your mobile browser.

In my opinion, there’s really no need for Publishers to build apps. Rather use the resources and money to build an awesome responsive site that gives your mobile users a great user experience regardless of which device they are using to visit your site.

Mobile first?

‘Mobile first’ is a mantra I often hear in the design and development process, but sadly the reality is that mobile is still treated like an afterthought by many. I know many of my team members (and even a few of our developers) hardly ever even look at our mobile site, probably because they sit behind a desktop all day.

This is why I firmly believe that online publishers should stop spending valuable resources on building apps and instead focus on building responsive mobile sites that gives their users the best mobile device experience.

Image: Brendan Lynch via Flickr.