We have a client looking to build a lighter mobile version of an existing app. This is pretty exciting as it will be our first mobile app in Retool.
I am already leaning towards a responsive web app as I've read it can render faster and be easier for the user (follow link vs install app).
What has been your experience either way? Are there any gotchas or pros/cons when making this decision? How do development and testing times compare between the two options? How does the offline experience differ?
Feel free to share any insights, and I’ll be happy to share our journey once the project is underway!
From my experience, if you don't need some specific feature you can only get with mobile, I'd recommend just building a Retool web app with a mobile view. Retool mobile is much more limited especially with regards to UI/UX.
Thanks for kicking off this discussion - I'm interested to hear from our community
There's certainly pros & cons to each option! I agree that it depends on your use case & the features you'll need. As Travis alludes to, web apps have a larger component library and more UI options in general. However, one thing to consider is that "offline mode" is a Retool Mobile specific feature - Offline mode | Retool Docs (not available on web apps for mobile browsers)
I am not sure about trends, but I can ask internally.
Retool ships a new cloud web app version multiple times a week. Typically, we aim to deploy new mobile version to the app/play store each week or every other week, but it can be less often than that. The difference in cadence is because it takes more time for Apple/Google to review apps.
Additionally, I believe it takes ~7 days for mobile app version updates go out to every user on auto update, or they can manually update the app version. These timelines are just for the Retool updates, bug fixes, etc. Changes you make to the mobile app will still reflect when the app is refreshed.
