Let your strategy guide you instead of a commercial catchphrase.

The smartphone sitting on the desk next to you is a tremendous tool. It’s loaded with utilities, provides a camera in a pinch, and gives you recommendations for local restaurants and the latest movies on request.

If you are like most people, your home screen is littered with dozens of icons. You may have apps loaded on your phone that were never launched more than once or twice. Compare this with the number of times you use the web browser on the device. It’s likely that this gets used every day. With that in mind, what is the driver to build an app? What has led to this situation playing out in commercials on nighttime TV?

“App for That” Marketing
The simple answer to this is “marketing hype.” Basically, apps are seen as cool. They are marketed as flashy, engaging and always touted as being useful, but when was the last time you encountered a newly downloaded app that was truly useful or engaging? If you’re anything like me, you might find one or two each month that are worth keeping.

I’m voracious in my downloading of apps. I currently have 115 apps installed on my phone. I check out the store a couple times a week to see what’s new or featured. There are a handful of apps I use regularly, but a lot of time on my phone is spent in the web browser, consuming content via the mobile web. Granted, my app download count is high—I have about twice the average—but my habits of using just a handful of them aren’t out of the ordinary, according to usage studies among smartphone owners (asymco.com).

Contributing to this hype is that, in the pursuit of the mobile app store gold rush, thousands of developers have flocked to mobile platforms, each creating their own simple calculator or single-purpose utility application. Whether it’s a weather app or yet another movie player, these developers have all got their hopes set on creating the next best-selling app. The catchphrase, “There’s an app for that,” has been cemented in the minds of just about anyone with a smartphone, or a developer toolkit and a dream. There is no doubt that this new technology has led to a cultural shift and a wave of innovation, but we should examine our business strategies and technology needs before we jump into the pool and surrender to the app store so hastily.

The perceived money-making opportunity in the sale of apps is a driver for many, but we must remain grounded. A few lucky individuals have made money, while the vast majority of the developer crowd sees their apps largely unsold among the hordes of over 350,000 in the Apple App Store. With over $1.8 billion made in the app store in 2010, that only amounts to about $5,000 per app, on average. For every successful app like Angry Birds or Flipboard, there are hundreds of no-names—and the numbers are gloomier in the anecdotal stories from the Android Market. So, with a harsh dose of reality applied, let’s talk about how you can use your business goals to determine if you need an “app for that” or if the mobile web is the way to go.

Meeting Your Goals
Many people jump to the conclusion that an app has to be the answer due to a lack of understanding of how powerful the packaged web browsers on their devices actually are. This cuts out the innovation that can occur via simply employing web design technologies to achieve your business goals. The mobile web option is also great from a budgeting standpoint, as web design is comparatively inexpensive compared to dedicated app developers. Hourly rates for web designers are about half that of app developers.

Realizing just how capable the average mobile web browser is can show how far you can push the mobile web experience without employing native app development, thereby eliminating the costs and extra considerations required by that type of development. The web community uses a number of standards to verify the integrity of websites, including quite a few benchmarking sites and toolkits. Using these tools, mobile web browsers tend to be capable of rendering advanced web content, often with high levels of interactivity and advanced styling via CSS3 and HTML5.

Mobile web browsers are able to access a number of pieces of hardware on the phone. Device orientation, geolocation and data detectors that can recognize addresses and phone numbers are included in modern operating systems, so you can provide a lot of utility by simply using the built-in functions that ship with the phone. As OS revisions ship, software and hardware vendors seem to be working more in concert with each other, recognizing the need for deeper integration, which opens new capabilities to web developers.

When you consider the capability of the available platforms and the costs to develop an app for a single platform, the case for using the mobile web becomes more evident if you need to deploy your project on iOS, Android and BlackBerry. While there are cross-platform app development tools and APIs out there, they rely on using web technologies like HTML and JavaScript in order to function. Developing mobile apps can become costly as you add platforms to support.

Check Your Requirements
So at this point, you may be asking yourself, why would you build a mobile app if there are so many advantages to the mobile web? The answer can be found in the following statement: You only “need an app for that” if the desired business model and/or the application functional requirements necessitate it.

As of right now, most monetization for web content lies in ad sales, SaaS (software as a service) or subscription via paywalls. If these don’t mesh with your business’ strategy, you may need an app in order to allow for upfront purchase from an online app store. Do keep this in mind: every app store takes its cut, often 30 percent of the price. If you can implement a pricing method that works for the mobile web, you may come out ahead by using the web instead of a dedicated app. If the web model doesn’t work for you, you will probably need a dedicated app.

The application’s functional requirements can be a little harder to discern. Without an expert to tell you if your idea is possible via the web, it can be a dicey proposition to determine yourself. Use this basic rule of thumb to help guide you: if you need deep hardware access to accomplish your goal (say using the camera, the compass, or the gyroscope), if you need to store content for non-web connected scenarios (local file storage or databases), or if you need advanced 3D graphics, you will probably need an app. If you are providing a highly polished user experience with advanced capabilities or visualization, that probably means a dedicated app instead of the mobile web. This requirement shifts a little bit more to the mobile web with every successive hardware generation and operating system software release.

If business and functional requirements don’t point towards an app, and you already have web technologies as part of your overall business communications, why not forgo the app and hit the mobile web? You’ll be trading a little flash and prestige, but you’ll have a cost-effective, cross-platform, forward-compatible mechanism that’s available for all who visit your website or perform a Google search for your product or service. That alone may be the biggest reason for why you don’t need an “app for that.” iBi