• Home
• About Us
• Our Work
• Blog
• Talk To Us

One of the more common questions app developers hear is about Mobile Web vs. Native Apps and which one is “better.”

There’s no doubt that both have strengths, and that each has its own limitations.  Regardless of the technology, what’s ultimately at stake is the Customer Experience and what will make the best end-user product and enhance usability and allow you to reach the largest – and most appropriate – audience.  In most cases integrated HTML5 pages into native apps can offer a solid approach that benefits everybody.  But ultimately “gut” and emotion becomes a big part of the conversation.

One of the key factors missing from the discussion is typically actual analytics and data to help frame the topic.  New data from app analytics firm Flurry finds that mobile users are spending more time with native apps than mobile web browsing, widening a gap that appeared last summer.

Flurry posits that a good amount of the change could be due to higher usage of Facebook in apps – notably with the recently released Facebook iPad app:

Our analysis shows that people are now spending less time on the traditional web than they did during the summer 2011. This drop appears to be driven largely by a decrease in time spent on Facebook from the traditional web.  In June 2011, the average Facebook user spent over 33 minutes on average per day on the website.  Now, that number is below 24 minutes. Time spent on the web without Facebook has grown at a modest rate of 2% between June 2011 and December 2011.

Regardless of Facebook’s actual impact, the continued growth of native apps relative to the mobile web is a trend very much worth watching and studying as we determine the best approaches for mobile strategies.

Email This

html5, Mobile, Strategy, Web