Do you need a website or an Android app?

The short version

An app earns its keep when customers come back repeatedly and you need something on their phone between visits. A website earns its keep when customers need to find you, judge you, and get in touch.

Those are different problems. Most small businesses have the second one and describe it as the first.

Signs you want a website

This covers the large majority of trades, practices, restaurants, retailers and professional services. Our website plans sit across this band, quoted per project, and a mid-range build with local SEO is the most common right answer.

• Customers find you by searching a category rather than your name
• Most people contact you once, or a few times a year
• Your competitors show up in Google and you do not
• What you need is credibility, a clear list of services, and a way to get in touch

Signs you want an app

Our Android builds are quoted per project — one covering up to eight screens with authentication and a basic backend, another adding payments, bookings and an admin dashboard. Both ship to Google Play under your own developer account, which matters: the listing belongs to you, not to us.

• Customers interact weekly or more — loyalty, memberships, bookings, deliveries
• You need push notifications to bring people back, and email is not working
• Staff or drivers need a tool in the field, not a website
• You are handling accounts and payments repeatedly for the same people

The trap: an app nobody installs

The failure case for a small-business app is not that it is built badly. It is that it is built well and nobody installs it. Getting somebody to download an app is a much harder ask than getting them to open a web page, and that friction has to be paid for by something they genuinely want.

If you cannot say clearly why a customer would install it and what brings them back, the app will sit at a handful of downloads regardless of how good it is. That is not a reason never to build one — it is a reason to be certain about the answer first.

The order we usually recommend

Website first, almost always. It is cheaper, it is what search engines index, and it is where an app would send people to be discovered anyway. Once the site is bringing in customers and you can see which ones come back, you will know whether an app has a job to do — and you will know what that job is, which is the part that makes app projects succeed.