A 5-question framework we use with clients to decide whether the App Store route is worth it — or if a polished PWA does the job for a tenth of the cost.
When clients ask "should we build a mobile app?" they almost never actually mean "should we be in the App Store?" They mean "we want a great mobile experience for our customers."
Those two things are very different decisions, and conflating them costs Phoenix-area clients hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on apps they didn't need.
Here's the five-question framework we run before recommending native (or React Native) over a PWA.
The honest answer for most services businesses is no. Camera, geolocation, push notifications (yes, on iOS now too with PWAs), local storage, even payments via Apple Pay — all available to a well-built PWA. Where PWAs still hit walls: HealthKit, Bluetooth peripherals, advanced biometrics, background location tracking, and platform-specific integrations like Live Activities. If you don't need any of those, the PWA route is on the table.
If your business is one users will discover by typing your name into the App Store ("McDonald's app", "Bank of America app"), the App Store presence has independent value beyond the app itself — it's a search-discovery channel. If users will only find you via your website, your social media, or word of mouth, App Store presence has near-zero value, just cost.
Apps require updates. iOS rolls out a new SDK every September; Android, every August. If you ship an app and then don't touch it for 18 months, you'll have crashes, deprecation warnings, App Store review issues, and an aging UI that pulls down your brand. Apps are a continuous cost, not a one-time build.
Apps make sense for daily engagement (banking, fitness, social). They're often overkill for rare engagement (booking a contractor, ordering a quote, browsing a portfolio) — those use cases work better as a fast PWA the user can hit from their browser without the friction of installing, signing in, and dealing with notifications they didn't ask for.
A serviceable native app (React Native, single codebase to both stores) is $40-80K to build, $15-30K/year to maintain. A polished PWA with home-screen install, offline mode, push notifications, and native-feeling animations is $12-25K to build, $5-10K/year to maintain. If your runway can't sustain the maintenance cost of an app over a 3-year horizon, don't build one.
For local services businesses (~80% of our SMB client base), the answer is almost always "polished PWA, not an app." We get the same user experience, indexable URLs (apps don't get indexed, PWAs do), no App Store review queue, no platform-specific bugs, and a tenth of the cost.
For e-commerce brands with high purchase frequency or any business with daily-engagement loops (membership communities, fitness, finance), we recommend React Native — single codebase, both platforms, mature ecosystem.
The framework above is what we walk every prospect through before quoting. About a third of the time it talks them out of an app they were sure they needed, and they go home with a faster, cheaper PWA that does the job.
30-minute discovery call, no pitch deck. We'll tell you what we'd do, what it costs, and how we'd measure it. No commitment.