The Product Side

On a mobile-first world, first do the web

People ask me often, to give them a quote or guidance in order to create a mobile app for their new project / startup. While, I admit this is a mobile-first world we are living in, creating the mobile app shouldn’t be your first priority, in this case.

The reason is simple: when you’re a startup you have to validate that your idea is correct, then build traction, then convert some of this traction to (paying) customers / users and then iterate all over. Building a mobile app for just one platform (either Android or iPhone [1]) may easily take 3x — 5x times more resources (money / people), compared to creating a responsive website. So, with a native mobile app, what you end up having is:

• Pros: better user experience (leading to bigger conversion rates, more traction, etc.).
• Cons: delayed launch / wasted more money / only works in one mobile platform [1] / does not work on the web

Why take this risk when you are still exploring what your product will be?

When you’re a startup you need to evolve quick, verify what works and what not and doing so requires a lot of trial and error experiments. Implementing a mobile app at this stage is too soon. Maybe you don’t have all the features right, maybe you need to pivot, maybe … You should be nimble and able to execute without the burden of maintaining two native mobile apps.

Web technologies have evolved much and can produce an excellent experience both on desktop and on mobile browsers. This should be enough and do the trick. Actually this may be your only option, at the beginning, if you’re a startup. So start with web, gather data, see what types of visitors you get, what functionality they use, what devices they use and then decide on how to proceed.

Now the next question when creating your web app, is if you should follow a

1. create for desktop-first and then optimize for mobile, or
2. create for mobile-first and then extend to desktop strategy.

This mostly depends on the context of your offering and the types of users that you have. Most of the times, it is preferable to go for option 1, as designing for desktop gives you more options, lets you present your offering in a more complete way and works fine on mobile too. Option 2 can produce a desktop website that feels empty.

Note: when contemplating which strategy to follow, do not forget how Google ranks your site. Samuel Schmitt has writen an excellent article on the subject.

If your startup does well and you get many users, then you will most probably create native mobile apps (and be able to afford them). By then, you will know what your app functionality should be and may even decide not to go for both platforms at once (for example start with iOS and have your Android app in 8 months).

Note 1: Most of the comments above, apply not only to startups, but to established companies too.

Note 2: obviously one size does not fit all and there are exceptions, most notable one being games.

[1] One may argue that technologies such as React Native, Xamarin, Cordova etc. overcome this constraint: you only build once and then cover both platforms. They do, but this comes at a cost: not all native features may be implemented in the respective technology, you may find it harder to create / debug than native code, you are certainly dependent on the progress and viability of each technology and most importantly the user experience is not on par with a native implementation. So if your main reason for going mobile-first is to achieve the best UX possible, then think twice before jumping on their boat.