Why paying for an app that does nothing more than a simple Website ?

exportforce

Hello,

at first for the trolls and fanbois: Please try to stay away as this is a serious question.

i just got the e-Mail with the special offer. Since I have some ideas for a few apps I thought I give that thing a try.
But when I look through the possibilities I have all that comes to my mind is: All that I can do with a extremly simple HTML-Page from a webspace hosting for a few bucks too. Where is the difference. What does an Andromo App which is not really just a website ?

At the  moment Andromo looks like a "Busniness Card Creator" with some, not that necessary, features.

Or is there anything I am missing to see ?

kind regards

lorne

It depends on which features you use, to be honest. If you just use a Website or Custom Page activity, then it isn't that far from a mobile website. You do get the Action bar navigation between activities, and you also get an app to put in Google Play, which for some of our users is worth the price of admission alone.

If you use an HTML Archive activity, you can package up a website to be fully available offline, which is something you obviously can't do with a mobile web site (aside from the small part of your audience using an app like Pocket).

The biggest advantage, though, is in the other activity types -- the Audio activities, Photo Gallery, Twitter, RSS feed, About, Contact us, etc. which are entirely 100% natively coded. They simply perform far better and are much better integrated than any HTML-based simulation can hope to be.

The biggest problem is that HTML-based apps are kind of clunky and don't work as well as they could. They're invariably slower, they don't always zoom or reflow the way you want, they don't work offline, and they can't take advantage of the same native APIs as a fully native app. They also rarely put any effort into trying to tailor the user experience for Android, since doing platform-specific UIs in HTML5 is tricky and a lot of work.

The advantage of HTML-based apps and mobile web sites is that, while they aren't optimized for any given platform (or at least not more than one), they at least work on all platforms...just never as well as a native app.

I guess the TL/DR version is that mobile apps are good (and given the variety of mobile platforms, you definitely should have one), but a native app is going to perform better. It really depends how important the Android platform is to you, and what kind of impression you want your app to make.