Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name
is Eric and I make apps. Now this week, I
wanna ask "Do you need a mobile website
or an app?".
Alright, let me start out this week by
apologizing. I'm a few days late on
this video. I try to get them done every
Friday, but yeah it's already
Sunday night, and I've been trying.
It's been a hectic week with client
work. I may have mentioned this before
like we do work for clients,
but we do mostly our own app. Most
of our income comes from our own apps,
but occasionally we do work for
clients, and it could be
challenging, but it can also be
very rewarding. And it's nice to be able
to work on something where
somebody else takes creative control and
we just like yeah we could do that, and
that's pretty cool. Now we
meet with like a lot of clients. We get a
lot of phone calls and stuff like that. I
get a lot of phone calls. And one
of the things that you know was....
quite a lot we get asked
"Do I need to do this app? or can I
just do like a mobile website? And you
know, it's a really good question.
If I got like dominoes
or whatever. They say download our app,
then I think "Do I really
need a Domino's app on my phone? Do I really
need something taking that space on
my phone which was just Domino's?" Now,
to be honest with you, I do go to Domino's
far too often, but like let's say
something else. Let's say it's like a
hairdresser or whatever. Do they
really need an app? I mean, am I gonna
download an app something that you know
are hardly ever used? Probably not. That
would probably be better be a website,
but there are some things that are really
good for mobile, for an app. And
usually when I talk to clients, when
they say "Why would I do an app
or website? i just hit the main ones.
The biggest one for me is always offline
storage. It's just being able to
login once, having things there all the
time and having you know if I try to
save something through the app depending
on what kind of thing it is, that it's
not going to just crash if there's no
internet connection, right? It will store
things locally and connect to a server
later if it needs to. But mainly
is the offline storage and then you got
the big ones like the GPS, the Camera, the
Microphone you know all that kind of
stuff. But you know if you're into Html5
development, you know that those API's
are available for Html5 now as well.
But then, you also have the things
like the purchases. It's so easy to
make a purchase
you know with a mobile, I'm sorry,
with an app than it is with a
mobile website. You know with the
mobile website you still have things
like Paypal and stuff like that, but with
an app it's just a click of a button, you're
already set up with your credit card
details and all that stuff either
through the app store or
through Google wallet. And that's just
one of the things. It's those
impulse buys are much easier to do.
And probably one of the biggest reasons
to do an app instead of a website is the
smaller market. Like every week I
talk about there's thousands
of apps being created every day going
into Google Play and into the app
store, but you know there's billions
of websites. You're talking
about an app store of millions
compared to the world wide web of
billions is a lot you know it's a lot
smaller market. Getting ranked
on Google is you all know how
hard it is. I mean you get spanned about
you know getting on the front page of
Google all the time. But it's a lot
easier to get to rank well on
the smaller app market. And if you can
get your clients to actually download
your app then that's really good real
estate because every time they go
through and they're looking at their
apps yours comes up. Now if they don't
use your app, if it doesn't serve them in
even just give him any value then of
course you know that's going to be the
first thing to go. If I have a
hairdresser app because I downloaded it
because whatever reason I
get a freak perm, I guess. I don't know.
I don't know what you get.
So then the next time I'm
looking at my apps, trying to free up
some space on my phone that's the first
thing to go, but there's
something about apps at the moment where
they're really really sexy. I mean,
they've been out for ages now. What we're
gonna get to the... you know well they've
been around 8 years now? The app
market's a 7 - 8 years but people still get
excited about them. They get more excited
about apps and they do about websites
and mobile website.But you know
there's so many things you could do with
the mobile website.
And that technology is growing all the
time, but you know that's
usually what I tell clients. It'll be
interesting to see what you
think. I mean it's obviously we're into
the app market. If you're doing a game,
you know you want an app.
If you're doing something like..
well all of our apps are you know genuine
apps, but sometimes
we do something for a
client which could yeah you know
I'll even tell them "Do you think this
should be a website instead?" But you know
because they're so that their hearts are
set on having an app that's like "No no, I
think it should be an app" and then they'll
tell me this apps for the future, all
this kind of stuff which should be my
spiel but anyway. So anyway, this
week I just wanna talk a little bit
about you know about that the apps
versus the website. Apps vs Mobile
websites, and I think eventually we'll
get to the point where mobile websites
will be just as ubiquitous as a
mobile app. So anyway, that's it for
this week. I hope it's been helpful. Kind
of all over the place. Sorry I'm late and
I'll talk to you next week!