| This reminded me of a story. A friend of mine was once contacted to build an app for a respectable non-profit with a low-ish budget. The developer friend thought "this app as described would be WAY better as a website with some app-like features, not an app-store app. Tons of people will want it as a website but not as an app...it'll just sit in the app store unused. Give people a way to find the pages of the app via third-party search engine and it'll probably be amazing." So he planned to start building it in a hybrid style, just in case. The proposal to build an app went forward, and was accepted. The non-profit then requested some significant new, scope-changing features during the project discussions. The developer said, "those new features will cost extra, do you want an estimate?" and gave them an estimate. The client said they didn't have the budget but still wanted the features. Possible? So the developer said "we could include those features, and really beautifully so, if you decided to make it a website. But then it wouldn't be an 'app' in the traditional sense anymore, with the manifest and all that offline stuff, to say nothing of app-store presence, because of budget reasons X, Y, and Z. The best you could call it is a web app." The client immediately said "it doesn't matter, a web app is fine as long as we let people know to download important data from the web version before they go offline! Really that's our only hurdle here!" The developer said "WTF, OK" but made a note of the discussion, and built a lovely new website and it worked great. The website contained warnings--grab this data if you go offline, and so on. People loved the web experience, it was one-of-a-kind and got lots of compliments. Still, later on, organizational stakeholders tried to hold the non-profit responsible for calling it an "app"...meanwhile it was more like a website?! What is this, some kind of a scam? Show me where it is in the app store? The NPO staff pushed back on the developer friend. <-- This was really not cool--a red flag for sure. He said, "ah, but you remember our discussion...? You wanted extra features but didn't have the budget. So I gave you a choice and YOU made the choice to no longer build an app in that sense. And by the way--it's still technically an app...oh and also your organic search presence is so much better with this thing exposed to search engines..." So: The app, that wasn't. But was? But also wasn't. He never expected the term "app" to require so much hacking. |