iPhone Apps – the current sensation in marketing circles.  Every brand wants a piece of the iPhone action.  Are brands jumping on this bandwagon as part of an overall mobile strategy or is it just the current trendy thing to do?  Are brands becoming pre-occupied with mobile apps?

Many people forget that an iPhone app can only be used by people who have an iPhone.  Whilst the iPhone is undoubtedly popular, it only has at most 5% of the market, so brands are effectively ignoring a majority of their consumers.  Can this really be part of a considered mobile strategy?

There are a number of solutions to this problem:

1) Ignore it.

2) Create apps for other devices.  This is expensive as it means a seperate development for each class of device, in a different programming language

3) Get the best of both worlds with a combined app and mobile web strategy.  This can reach more consumers for a lower .

Save money, get a bigger audience

If you could have a solution that delivered the coveted iPhone app and also addressed consumers on all other devices you would have maximum coverage for your brand.  And if it cost less than developing the native iPhone App, what’s not to like?

Using the latest release of the bemoko multi-channel web development framework, web developers can create a mobile website which works on all devices.  The framework very easily allows the site to be tweaked for the iPhone, allowing it to be styled as an app with all the sliding page transitions and fancy effects associated with an app.  So now you have a website that looks like an app, the icing on the cake comes with our integration of the PhoneGap framework to wrap the website in native code so it can be placed in the app store as a normal app and downloaded by consumers.

Now you have the iPhone App for the iPhone users and also a website that can be used by all your consumers whatever device they are on.  And, because developing a website is much cheaper than developing a specialised app, you’ve only paid a fraction of the price of a native iPhone app with a limited audience.

Finally, a mobile strategy to keep everyone happy!