Apps vs. Websites

I'm curious how others feel about this. On a Phone or Tablet, when you have the choice between using an app from a company, or their website, which do you prefer?

I am somewhat conflicted. I find the experience of using an app to often feel more polished and responsive. What bugs me however is the lack of control. With a website you still have a degree of control over your experience. You have the ability to block offensive content, and there are established limits on what the website can do to your device or on your behalf.

One example of app behavior that really bugs me is every time I get an email and it has "Sent from my iPhone" or "Sent from Outlook Mobile" at the bottom. I always wonder if these people even know that they've been recruited as advertising tools? I'm guessing that most don't even know that it's adding that to their emails, even though it was probably in the fine print when they clicked accept on the EULA. It's funny because I've seen important emails get sent, and then you see "Sent from my iPhone" or whatever at the bottom and it straight-up cheapens the email, thinking that they are just casually firing it off from their phone. Either way, it's certainly no one's business what device or app I'm using to send my email, and I find it disturbing that this kind of activity has become commonplace among apps and even a likely reason why companies would prefer that people use them.

So mainly for that reason (lack of control when using apps), I tend to prefer using a mobile website. The forceful nature of the banners, etc that try to push the app while using the mobile website is obnoxious unfortunately, and makes me wonder if at some point in the future mobile websites will simply be discontinued, leaving apps as the only option

Edit: To clarify poll options, option #3 is for people who basically don't have any mobile devices, or where something like a windows laptop is their only "mobile device". I know most all of us have desktops, etc, in addition to our mobile devices.

GotNoRice said:

.One example of app behavior that really bugs me is every time I get an email and it has "Sent from my iPhone" or "Sent from Outlook Mobile" at the bottom. I always wonder if these people even know that they've been recruited as advertising tools? I'm guessing that most don't even know that it's adding that to their emails, even though it was probably in the fine print when they clicked accept on the EULA. It's funny because I've seen important emails get sent, and then you see "Sent from my iPhone" or whatever at the bottom and it straight-up cheapens the email, thinking that they are just casually firing it off from their phone. Either way, it's certainly no one's business what device or app I'm using to send my email, and I find it disturbing that this kind of activity has become commonplace among apps and even a likely reason why companies would prefer that people use them.

Click to expand...

That's just to remind people that if your email seems terse or suffers from autocorrect mistakes, it's because it was sent from your phone. If someone is gullible enough to buy a particular phone just because they see "sent from <some brand>" in someone's signature, they got what was coming to them.

For me, whether or not I use an app depends on whether or not it provides additional value over opening the site in a mobile browser. Gmail is slow and looks weird in a mobile browser, but has great apps for iOS and Android. Amazon is stripped down and gimped in its mobile app, but works great in a mobile browser, so I don't use their app.

I'm also not into downloading ads on mobile where I pay for my data in small chunks, so your mobile app is automatically disqualified if it has advertisements in it.

Apps mostly, but it depends on the website and what the app delivers Vs the app.

I don't buy into the nonsense of having to waste time, bandwidth and storage to download an app per site versus using one universal browser. Apps were needed in the past since mobile browser was stripped down and not able to view all sites but these days mobile Chrome is almost as good as desktop Chrome and it even supports action bar notifications.

BTW you can easily change the email signature. People are just lazy and dont. That is just the default.

I like using the Apps on mobile devices.

I'd like a Netflix and Amazon video app for Windows 7.
Amazon had a desktop app but they got rid of it as well as botching the DRM conversion so that Amazon Unbox videos would play in WMP. I have a bunch of videos I bought that I can't play offline due to the conversion not working. I still have them in my library on Amazon's site but I have to stream them over the internet.

Depends on how badly the mobile website or app is written, and how unfrequently I visit it. The more often I use it the more likely I'll prefer a quality app over the website....

Most of the time, however, it is safe to assume the app is badly done and 1/2 broken compared to the website.