You are a startup. You have twelve users, three of whom are your mum, your co-founder, and your co-founder’s mum. You have six months of runway. You have not found product-market fit. You are still pivoting weekly based on whatever feedback you got from the last person who agreed to a demo.
And you want to build a mobile app.
No. Stop. Put the Xcode down and step away from the keyboard.
A website works fine
Here is a secret the mobile-first crowd does not want you to know: responsive websites work on phones. They have worked on phones for over a decade. Users can open a browser, type a URL, and use your product. They can even add it to their home screen if they really want to, and it will look exactly like an app.
This is not a compromise. This is fine. For most products, especially early-stage products, a website does everything you need. It loads. It works. It does not require approval from Apple. It does not require you to maintain two codebases or learn Swift and Kotlin or pay someone who does.
But no, you want to be in the App Store. You want that little icon. You want the perceived legitimacy of being a Real App. This is vanity, not strategy.
The App Store is a nightmare
Let us talk about what you are signing up for. Apple takes 30% of any transactions. They can reject your app for arbitrary reasons. They can change the rules whenever they want. They can delay your update for weeks while you wait for review. They have done all of these things to companies far bigger than yours.
Google Play is slightly better but still takes their cut and still has approval processes and still requires you to deal with the fragmented hellscape of Android devices. Your app needs to work on a flagship Samsung and a four-year-old budget phone that someone bought at a petrol station. Good luck.
Meanwhile, a website just works. You push a change and it is live. No review process. No revenue share. No explaining to Tim Cook why your app deserves to exist.
You cannot afford two platforms
If you build a mobile app, you need to build two mobile apps. iOS and Android. Nobody ships to just one platform anymore. So now you are maintaining a web app, an iOS app, and an Android app. That is three codebases for a startup that cannot even afford a designer.
Yes, I know about React Native and Flutter. They are fine. They are also not magic. You still need to deal with platform-specific issues. You still need to test on actual devices. You still need to handle the app store submission process twice. The cross-platform frameworks reduce the problem. They do not eliminate it.
Every hour you spend on mobile is an hour you are not spending on the core product. At your stage, focus matters more than reach. You do not need to be everywhere. You need to be good somewhere.
Your users do not care
You think users care about having an app. Most do not. What users care about is whether your product solves their problem. If it does, they will use it in a browser. If it does not, no amount of native animation smoothness will save you.
The companies that genuinely need mobile apps are companies where mobile is core to the experience. Uber needs a mobile app because you order rides from your phone on the street. Instagram needs a mobile app because you take photos on your phone. Games need mobile apps because people play games on their phones.
Your B2B SaaS for managing invoices? Your marketplace for niche collectibles? Your productivity tool for small teams? A website is fine. Your users are probably on desktop half the time anyway. They will survive the minor indignity of using a browser on their phone for the other half.
Build the app later
I am not saying never build a mobile app. I am saying do not build one now. Build it when you have product-market fit. Build it when you have enough users that the mobile experience is actually limiting growth. Build it when you have the resources to do it properly instead of shipping a half-baked native app that is worse than your website.
The startups I have seen waste the most time and money are the ones that insisted on native apps from day one. They burned runway on mobile development while their core product languished. They delayed launches waiting for app store approval. They split their tiny engineering team across platforms instead of focusing.
The startups I have seen succeed are the ones that shipped a website, validated the idea, and only went native when the numbers justified it. Boring? Yes. Effective? Also yes.
Your startup does not need a mobile app. Your startup needs users. Build the thing that gets you users fastest. That thing is almost certainly not a mobile app.
Put down the Xcode. Step away slowly. Open your browser and ship something.