Before you brief a development team, you need an honest answer to one question: does this need to be an app at all?
We get asked this constantly by founders: "should we build an app?" The honest answer, most of the time, is: not yet — and here's how we help clients think through it.
Start with the job the product needs to do
A website is discoverable, shareable, and requires zero install friction — it's the right default for anything where new visitors need to find you, learn something, or make a one-off decision like a purchase or a booking. An app makes sense when people will use the product repeatedly, need offline access, or benefit from device features like push notifications, camera access, or background location.
The install tax is real
Every app requires someone to stop, go to a store, download, and open it before they get any value at all. That's a meaningful drop-off at every step. A website has no such tax — a link just works. If your core value can be delivered through a browser, that's usually the faster, cheaper path to validating whether people want the thing at all.
Progressive web apps are a real middle ground
For many businesses, a well-built responsive website with app-like interactions (offline caching, home-screen install prompts, push notifications where supported) delivers most of what a native app promises, without the cost of maintaining two separate native codebases plus app store review cycles.
When a native app is genuinely the right call
- The product depends on hardware access a browser can't reach reliably
- Users need full offline functionality, not just cached pages
- You need deep OS-level integration (widgets, background processing, biometric auth)
- Retention and daily engagement are the core business metric, not one-time conversion
Two scenarios, two different answers
Take a local service business — a plumber, a physio clinic, a boutique gym. Their customers search once, compare a few options, and book. Nobody is opening an app for that every week. A fast, well-optimized website with clear booking and contact flows will out-convert a native app every time, because it removes the install step between "found you" and "booked you." Now compare that to a subscription product people are meant to check daily — a habit tracker, a budgeting tool, a workout planner. There, repeat engagement is the whole business model, push notifications drive retention, and the friction of an install is a one-time cost against months of daily use. Same decision framework, opposite answer, because the job the product needs to do is different.
Our usual recommendation
Validate with a website or web app first. Once you have real usage data — how often people come back, what they're trying to do repeatedly, where a native app would remove real friction — that's the moment building a dedicated app stops being a guess and starts being a justified investment.
Found it useful? Pass it along.