I have built a mobile app channel from nothing into the largest online sales channel in a business, and the thing that made it possible was a decision taken at the start. The app was owned commercially, with a number attached, rather than owned by brand or by IT.
Most apps are commissioned the other way round. There is a strategic sense that the business should have one, a project is run, it launches, and then nobody owns whether it sells anything.
The question to answer before building
What can this do that a mobile browser cannot?
If the honest answer is nothing, an app is an expensive way to deliver a website, with a release cycle and two platform approvals attached. There are good answers to the question. Notifications with genuine value, saved state and identity, speed on repeat use, hardware access, offline. But the answer has to exist.
If an app cannot do something the mobile browser cannot, it is an expensive way to deliver a website.
What ownership looks like
- A revenue number, owned by a commercial person, reviewed weekly.
- A roadmap prioritised on commercial impact, not on parity with the website.
- Store presence treated as a channel to optimise, with the listing, screenshots and ratings actively worked.
- Notification strategy owned by someone who will be judged on retention rather than on opens.
- Analytics in the app that answer the same questions as the web, so the two can be compared honestly.
The parity trap in the second point is worth naming. Teams spend a year rebuilding every website feature in the app because it feels incomplete without them. Most of those features are not why anyone downloaded it.
Notifications are the whole relationship
An app gives you a direct line to a customer with no intermediary and no media cost. It is the most valuable permission in digital and the easiest to spend badly.
The test I use is simple. Would I be pleased to receive this? If a notification exists to hit a weekly send target, it is borrowing from the only asset the channel has.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Plenty of businesses should not build an app, and would be better served by a fast mobile site and a good email programme. That is a difficult recommendation to make when the budget is already approved, and it is sometimes the right one.