App or mobile website: which one should you choose

The question is almost always framed wrongly: "do we need an app or is a responsive site enough?" The right question is different — what problem are we solving and how often will the person come back? The answer changes the budget by a factor of five to ten and the timeline by several months.

The key criterion is return frequency

An app makes sense when the user comes back regularly: food delivery, banking, fitness, a loyalty programme, a work tool for staff. If someone deals with you once a year — buying an air conditioner or ordering windows — they will not install an app, and if they do, they will delete it within a week. A simple rule of thumb: an app is justified at a frequency of once a week or more. Anything rarer belongs on the website.

The installation barrier

Every step between wanting something and doing it loses part of the audience. A mobile site opens from a link instantly. An app requires going to the store, searching, downloading a hundred megabytes, waiting and registering. Most of the traffic arriving from advertising drops off along that chain. The practical conclusion: an app almost never works as an acquisition channel, but it works excellently as a retention channel for customers you already have.

What only an app can do

• Push notifications with full delivery on iOS and reliable background operation.
• Offline work with a proper local database.
• Deep device integration: biometrics, NFC payments, Bluetooth, background geolocation.
• Heavy graphics and real-time video processing.
• An icon on the home screen as a permanent reminder of the brand.

What only a website can do

• Be indexed by search engines and bring in free traffic — that is the job of SEO.
• Open instantly from a link in a messenger, an email or an ad.
• Update the moment you publish, with no store review and no waiting for users to upgrade.
• Work identically on every device from a single codebase.
• Cost several times less to build and maintain.

The third path: PWA

A progressive web app sits in between: it is a website that installs on the home screen, works offline and can send push notifications. On Android the capabilities barely differ from native; on iOS there are limitations, though the gap has narrowed noticeably in recent years. The economics are attractive: the cost is close to a website while the behaviour is close to an app. We cover this option in detail in our mobile development articles, and the technical requirements for PWAs are well documented on web.dev.

Money and timelines compared

A quality responsive website: from 300,000 roubles, 1–2 months, maintenance from 20,000 a month. A PWA built on an existing site: an extra 150,000–400,000 roubles and 3–6 weeks. A native app for two platforms: from 1.5 million roubles, 4–6 months, maintenance from 60,000 a month plus mandatory annual updates for new OS versions. Cross-platform development cuts the budget by roughly a third with a small loss in performance.

How to decide in your case

Answer four questions. How often will the customer use the service? Do they need device features — camera, offline, NFC payments? Where will users come from: search or your existing customer base? Do you have budget not just for development but for two years of support? If at least two answers lean towards the website, start with a site or a PWA and come back to an app once you have a core of loyal users. Examples of both approaches are in the portfolio, and you can walk through your own case here.