Consumers Like Mobile Apps More Than Mobile Sites

Companies often wonder what will be better for their businesses – creating mobile apps or making their website mobile-friendly. This mainly depends on the needs of the business and the goals that they aspire to achieve, but it’s good to take into account consumer preferences as well.

I read about this in an article in Econsultancy on research from technology performance company Compuware. It seems that 85% of consumers favour apps over mobile sites chiefly because they are easier to use and provide a faster experience. More than half of the survey respondents said that they like apps more because of their convenience and 48% cited speed as their biggest benefit. For 40% of the sample, apps are easier to browse and 28% feel that they provide a more engaging experience. Apps are even more useful when shopping online, according to 27% of the respondents.

Consumers’ increasing use of apps comes hand in hand with increasing expectations. More than one in four app users said that they expect them to load faster than a mobile-optimised site and only 36% expect apps’ load time to be the same as that of websites. According to 23% of the respondents, mobile sites should load quicker than apps.

Meanwhile, encountering problems while using an app seem to happen quite often though, as 56% of respondents said that they had issues with a mobile app in the past six months; crashing or freezing is the most common problem, cited by 62% of the sample, followed by long load times (47%) and not loading at all (40%).

The report is based on responses from 3,534 smartphone owners in the UK, US, France, Germany, India and Japan.