If you check your phone’s screen time data, you’ll notice something: most of your digital activity happens inside apps, not browsers. You open Instagram rather than visiting instagram.com. You check Slack instead of your company’s intranet. You order food through DoorDash’s app, read newsletters in Substack’s app, and manage projects in Notion’s app. The browser, once the primary portal to the internet, has become secondary infrastructure.
This shift matters for anyone building a digital business. Where your audience spends their time determines how you reach them, how you retain them, and whether you control that relationship. For years, the conventional wisdom was simple: build a website, drive traffic to it, capture emails, and hope people return. That model is fraying.
Apps are becoming the default interface for digital businesses because they solve problems that websites and social platforms cannot. They offer persistence, control, and continuity in ways that borrowed real estate on Facebook or a domain name never could. Understanding why this is happening, and what it means for how we build digital products, requires looking past surface trends to the underlying mechanics of how people interact with digital tools.
The Difference Between Visiting and Installing
A website visit is transactional. Someone clicks a link, reads content, maybe completes an action, then leaves. The relationship ends when the tab closes. You can encourage return visits through bookmarks, email reminders, or SEO, but the default state is absence. Your website exists when someone actively chooses to visit it.
An app creates a different relationship. Installation is a commitment, however small. The user grants storage space, agrees to permissions, and places your icon alongside their most-used tools. The app doesn’t disappear between sessions. It persists, visible, taking up space in both storage and attention. It can send notifications. It can update in the background. It maintains state between uses.
This persistence creates ongoing presence in a user’s digital environment. You’re not competing for a return visit. You’re already there, waiting to be opened. The friction between “I should check that” and actually checking drops significantly when the action is a single tap rather than typing a URL or finding a bookmark.
For digital businesses, this matters more than feature sets or design aesthetics. An installed app represents captured attention in a way a bookmarked site never does. Users delete apps, certainly, but the decision to remove requires active choice. With websites, absence is the default and presence requires effort.
Why Social Platforms Cannot Replace Owned Distribution
The obvious counterargument is that social media platforms already solve the persistence problem. Instagram lives on everyone’s phone. Facebook has billions of daily users. Why not just build an audience there?
The answer comes down to control and sustainability. Platform-based audiences are rented, not owned. You build followers on Instagram, but Instagram owns the relationship. The algorithm determines which followers see your content. The platform sets the rules for how you can communicate and monetize. Those rules change frequently, often without warning and always without negotiation.
We’ve watched this play out repeatedly. Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change devastated publishers who had built audiences on the platform. Instagram’s shift toward Reels forced creators to adapt or become invisible. Twitter’s API changes broke third-party tools that businesses depended on. TikTok faces ongoing regulatory uncertainty that could eliminate it overnight in major markets.
Platform dependency creates structural vulnerability. Your business model depends on rules you don’t control, enforced by companies whose incentives don’t align with yours. When those rules change, you adapt or disappear.
Apps offer a middle ground. Yes, they distribute through app stores controlled by Apple and Google. Those companies set requirements and take percentages. But the app itself belongs to you. Its core functionality isn’t subject to algorithmic visibility. Users who install it can access it regardless of what Apple or Google prioritize in their recommendations. You can update it, change its business model, or migrate to alternative distribution methods if needed.
This isn’t absolute ownership, but it’s substantially more control than platform-based presence offers. The difference matters for sustainability and strategic planning.
The Economics of Attention
There’s an economic logic to why apps make sense for digital businesses. Acquiring attention is expensive. Whether through paid ads, content marketing, or social media growth, getting someone to notice your business requires resources. Once you have that attention, the goal is to retain it as efficiently as possible.
Websites require continuous reacquisition. Each visit is a separate conversion event. Someone sees your ad, clicks through, completes an action, then leaves. If you want them back, you need another touchpoint: another ad, another email, another piece of viral content. The cost of attention compounds with every interaction.
Apps change this calculation. The initial acquisition cost is higher because asking for installation requires more commitment than a simple click. But once installed, retention costs drop dramatically. You can communicate through push notifications at near-zero marginal cost. Updates happen automatically. The app’s presence on the user’s device serves as a constant, passive reminder.
The lifetime value equation shifts. Instead of paying repeatedly for each interaction, you pay once for installation and then maintain the relationship through the app itself. For businesses with products or services people use regularly, this math works strongly in favor of apps.
Lowering the Technical Barrier
The traditional obstacle to building apps was technical complexity. Mobile development required specialized skills: platform-specific programming languages, understanding of mobile operating systems, knowledge of app store submission processes. For most businesses, this meant either hiring developers or partnering with development agencies. Both options were expensive and time-intensive.
The tools have evolved significantly. Modern app builders use visual interfaces that let non-technical creators assemble functional apps without writing code. You define features through configuration rather than programming. The platform generates the necessary code automatically.
More recently, AI has started handling portions of the development process. Platforms like an app builder that incorporates AI can interpret natural language descriptions of desired functionality and generate the corresponding app structure. You describe what you want the app to do, and the system translates that into working components.
This isn’t about making app development trivial. Building a genuinely useful app still requires understanding your users, designing clear interfaces, and thinking through interaction flows. But the technical barrier has dropped from “requires months of learning programming languages” to “requires understanding your business needs and making informed design choices.”
That shift expands who can build apps. Small businesses that couldn’t afford development teams can create apps themselves. Solo creators can build tools for their specific audiences. Community organizers can make apps that serve local needs. The range of apps being built expands beyond what professional developers would create, because the people building them understand problems and audiences that wouldn’t register on a traditional developer’s radar.
What Apps Enable That Websites Cannot
Beyond persistence and control, apps offer capabilities that web browsers deliberately restrict for security and privacy reasons. These aren’t gimmicks; they’re functional differences that change what’s possible.
Apps can access device hardware directly. Camera, GPS, accelerometer, biometric sensors, local storage. A fitness app can track movement in the background. A photography app can integrate with the phone’s camera system. A navigation app can provide turn-by-turn directions using real-time location data.
Web browsers can access some of these features through APIs, but with significant limitations. Background processes are restricted. Storage is constrained. Access requires repeated permission grants. For many use cases, the web version of a service is functionally inferior to the app version.
Apps also work offline or in low-connectivity situations. They can store data locally and sync when connection is available. This matters more than it might seem. Users in areas with unreliable internet, or in situations where connectivity is intermittent (traveling, in buildings with poor signal), can still use the app. Websites become unusable the moment connectivity drops.
The cumulative effect of these differences is that apps can solve problems websites cannot. Some business models only work as apps because the required functionality isn’t available in browsers.
The Distribution Question
App stores are often cited as a weakness of the app model. Getting approved requires meeting platform requirements. Discovery is difficult when millions of apps compete for attention. Apple and Google take significant percentages of revenue.
These are real issues, but they’re often overstated. App store approval is mostly procedural. As long as your app functions properly and doesn’t violate content policies, approval is straightforward. The process creates some friction, but it also establishes baseline quality standards that benefit users.
Discovery is genuinely difficult, but it’s also difficult for websites. Google search is competitive. Social media algorithms favor existing large accounts. Email inboxes are saturated. There’s no distribution channel where new entrants have it easy. The question isn’t whether app store discovery is hard, but whether it’s harder than the alternatives. For many businesses, it isn’t.
The revenue share issue matters for apps that monetize through in-app purchases or subscriptions, where Apple and Google take 15-30%. But most digital businesses don’t monetize that way. If your app is a tool for delivering services, selling physical products, or building community, the app store’s cut is irrelevant because the money changes hands outside the app.
For businesses that do pay the app store percentage, the question is whether the benefits justify the cost. Often they do. The app store handles payment processing, fraud prevention, international currency conversion, tax compliance, and distribution infrastructure. Building and maintaining that yourself would cost more than the percentage you’re paying.
What This Means for Digital Strategy
The shift toward apps as default interfaces changes how digital businesses should think about their presence and infrastructure.
First, it reframes the website’s role. Rather than being your primary digital presence, your website becomes a landing page and SEO asset. It explains what you do, provides credibility, and gets indexed by search engines. But the actual engagement happens in the app. This is already how many successful digital businesses operate. Their websites are basically explanatory pages with download buttons.
Second, it changes customer acquisition strategy. Instead of optimizing for website traffic and return visits, you optimize for app installations and retention. The metrics shift from page views and session duration to installation rates, daily active users, and retention curves. The marketing tactics shift accordingly.
Third, it alters how you think about features and product development. Apps update on their own schedule. You don’t need to ensure backward compatibility with every browser version or worry about users with outdated systems. You can add features incrementally, test them with subsets of users, and iterate based on feedback. The development cycle becomes more fluid.
Fourth, it affects your relationship with your audience. Direct communication through push notifications is powerful but requires restraint. Overuse leads to uninstalls. The ongoing presence on users’ devices creates both opportunity and responsibility. You need to deliver enough value to justify the space you’re taking.
The Practical Reality for Different Business Types
Apps don’t make sense for every digital business. A blog or publication focused on reaching new readers through search and social shares probably still belongs primarily on the web. An e-commerce store serving occasional customers might find the installation barrier higher than the cart abandonment it prevents.
Apps make the most sense for businesses with repeat usage patterns. Services people use daily or weekly. Tools that provide ongoing value. Communities that members want to check regularly. Businesses where the customer relationship extends beyond a single transaction.
They also make sense when the required functionality demands app capabilities. Anything involving real-time location, background processes, hardware integration, or offline access works better as an app. Businesses in these categories don’t really have a choice; the web version would be too limited to be useful.
The financial consideration matters too. Building an app requires upfront investment, even with modern tools that reduce development costs. You need to maintain it, update it as operating systems change, and support users across different devices and OS versions. These aren’t prohibitive costs for most businesses, but they’re real.
The decision comes down to whether the benefits of direct access, reduced reacquisition costs, and enhanced capabilities outweigh the costs of development and maintenance. For an increasing number of digital businesses, that equation favors apps.
Ownership and Sustainability in Digital Products
At a deeper level, the shift toward apps reflects a broader reconsideration of how we build sustainable digital businesses. The past decade taught hard lessons about platform dependency. Companies that built entire business models on Facebook reach or Twitter distribution watched those channels collapse when algorithms changed. Creators who grew audiences on platforms they didn’t control found themselves with no recourse when rules shifted or accounts were suspended.
Apps don’t solve this completely. You’re still subject to app store policies and operating system changes. But they provide more independence than platform-based presence. You control the core product. You own the user relationship in a more direct sense. The infrastructure you build is portable; if one distribution channel becomes untenable, the app itself can move.
This matters for long-term planning. Digital businesses need sustainability, which requires some degree of ownership over their essential infrastructure. Rented space on platforms works for some purposes, but building a business that could evaporate with an algorithm update or policy change creates persistent vulnerability.
Apps represent a form of owned distribution. Not completely owned, not independent of external forces, but owned enough that you can plan around them. You can invest in development knowing that the result belongs to you in ways a Facebook page never could.
Where This Leaves Us
Apps are becoming the default interface for digital businesses because they solve real problems in how businesses connect with and serve their audiences. They offer persistence without platform dependency. They enable functionality that web browsers cannot provide. They create sustainable customer relationships at reasonable marginal cost.
The technical barriers that once made apps impractical for most businesses have dropped significantly. Modern development tools and AI assistance have made app creation accessible to non-technical founders and small teams. The question for digital businesses is shifting from “can we build an app?” to “should we?”
The answer depends on your specific situation: what you’re building, who you’re serving, and how those people interact with digital tools. But for many businesses, the calculation increasingly favors apps. Not because apps are inherently superior to websites, but because they match how people actually use their devices and how businesses actually need to maintain customer relationships.
This won’t reverse. Smartphones are the primary computing device for most people globally. Usage patterns continue moving toward apps rather than browsers. The tools for creating apps continue improving and becoming more accessible. The trend has momentum in both technology and user behavior.
For digital strategists and founders, this means rethinking where to invest resources and attention. The website remains important for discovery and credibility, but the app becomes the primary interface for engagement and retention. Getting this balance right, understanding when to build an app and how to integrate it into broader digital strategy, will increasingly define which digital businesses sustain themselves and which remain perpetually vulnerable to forces they don’t control.
