We’re Killing the Mobile Web

But we may be able to save it as well

Photo by Ali Abdul Rahman on Unsplash

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re browsing the web on your mobile phone or tablet and a banner appears on the top of the screen, urging you to install the site’s native app. This is the first time you ever visit this website, and so you decide not to install the app.

But when you visit the website a few more times, the banner keeps appearing, and after a while, you decide to give their native app a try.

You go to the store and download it. You open the app and start to use it. But you notice that what the app offers isn’t very different from what you got on the website.

But the user experience is better. There are no white screens when you go from page to page, and when you open the app, it launches immediately.

So you decide to use their native app instead of their website, even though it takes up tens of megabytes of storage on your mobile device and you regularly get nagged by endless updates.

Actually, speed and a better user experience are the main reasons people prefer native apps over mobile websites.

In fact, users are willing to go through the hassle of installing a native app and giving up storage space on their device just for the convenience and good user experience native apps provide.

And that’s a shame because the mobile web has strong advantages when it comes to ease of use, size, and discoverability, but this has no value when mobile websites offer a bad user experience.