Get an App for your Website

Nowadays mobile devices are more common than ever. Almost everyone, anywhere in the world, has one now, as they have become a lot more affordable. Intuitively, you will want to take advantage of this if you’re running a business. Every business should absolutely have a website anyways, so optimizing that for mobile devices is the first step. But there are significant advantages to going even further and getting your own app. Let’s take a look at what they are.

Offline Access

Nobody can look at your website while they have no internet connection. With an app you can change that. You can let users see all vital content that has been stored (cached) locally.

Push Notifications

With an app you can send everyone that has your app installed direct messages, as if you were texting them. These notifications are perfect for letting your users know about specials and promotions they can find on your website (and therefore in the app). It’s basically free advertising!

Improved Brand Awareness

Everyone that has your app installed will regularly see it’s icon on their phone. Just this quick glance can make them recall your brand when they think about a service you offer. Good brand awareness can bring in many returning customers but also increases the likelihood of your existing customers sharing your brand with other people who might need your service.

Instant Access to your Site

Users can reach your website very quickly at any time, they just need to take out their phone and click your app icon. This gives you a significant advantage over your competition, as the time to access their sites is a lot longer (opening the browser, searching for their website, slower load times, …).

Regularly Returning Users

When your users have your app installed, they will regularly browse it, even if they’re not looking for anything specific. You can get quite a few extra conversions just from this sort of traffic.

Apps offer better performance

Studies have shown that apps are usually about 50% faster than the equivalent website. It makes sense if you think about it, as way less data transfer over the internet is needed, because apps store layouts, images and more locally. Retrieving and displaying this locally stored data is way quicker than sending it all around the world first and then displaying it.

The Problem

Paying developers to code an app for you is expensive. Like, really expensive. You can get an estimate with this calculator: http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com/

I just went through it and it came up with a staggering cost of $48000 for an iOS and Android app that would communicate with an existing website. If you’re anything like me and don’t have that kind of money left over, you will want an alternative.

The Solution

As you most likely already have a website that is mobile friendly, you can use that to your advantage. How? With the website to app conversion service by webtoapp.design. You will get an app based on your website that runs on all Android and iOS (Apple) devices. It doesn’t just display your website, it also has all the advantages of an app listed above. 

The app works offline and displays the most important parts of your website even if no internet connection is available. However once the connection to the internet is established, it will update itself to make sure it always shows exactly what you can see on your website. So even if you add a new page or change anything else about your website, the app will still be up to date.

With the aforementioned offline availability the app also offers quicker page load times as parts of your website will be stored locally and can be displayed almost instantly.

Push notifications are also included, as that is a huge advantage of having an app, so you wouldn’t want to miss that when you convert your website into an app. 

Now you’re probably wondering what the price point is, given that I said it’s more affordable than a regular app. Well, with webtoapp.design you can get an app for iOS and Android with all the aforementioned features for less than $50 a month. Why is it a monthly payment? That’s because it also includes updates that improve your app’s performance, stability and that make sure your app works even on the newest devices and operating systems. This regularly needed maintenance is not even calculated into the estimate of $48000 I mentioned above, so less than $50 a month is a steal. If you took the $48000 you’d pay regular developers and instead invest it in this website to app service, it’d last you 80 years. 

Other Website to App Converters

Of course, webtoapp.design is not the only site that offers to turn your website into an app. There are other services that offer to make an app for you at a relatively low one-time price. This pricing model is inherently flawed though, as it encourages the developers to continually try to attract new customers and thus neglecting support for their existing apps and customers. This can lead to major security flaws and other issues, as software is aging at an increasing speed. Aside from that, all web to app services except webtoapp.design and gonative.io fail to implement the native design for apps.

This “native design” refers to the design guidelines Google and Apple have set and all apps must follow. If your app fails to comply with these rules, it will not get accepted into the App Stores. Or, if it does get accepted, it is at risk of getting removed at a later date (there’s regular “purges” where up to hundreds of thousands of apps are deleted). Unfortunately, gonative.io charges around $5000, if you just want to give them your URL and get all the features we’ve talked about above. So yes, it is a good website to app converter, but it, unfortunately doesn’t solve our initial problem of app development costs being too high.

So in conclusion the only web to app service I can recommend is webtoapp.design.