Raphaël: Welcome to the EC methodology series. In these articles and podcasts, we'll cover questions that come up when building a digital product. This series is intended for folks who have an idea for an app and want to learn more about what it takes to actually build one. So we'll start by clarifying some of the terminology around apps. It's an important question to ask. A, mobile app, a web app, a website? What's the difference? And who is this for?
It might seem like a silly question, but people use the word "app" to mean a lot of different things. It might be a mobile app, a web app, a desktop app, or even an internal automation process to name a few. Here's a few considerations for each. Mobile apps. Some things you might want to consider when building a mobile app include whether it needs to be compatible with iOS and Android. Depending on the type of app, if you want to run on both that might double your development time and costs.
With simpler apps, you can use a cross-platform framework, which will reduce your development times and costs. Most mobile apps will require setting up a backend system as well to host things like user data, but not all of them. You can build apps that only store data on the phone or provide functionality that doesn't require storing anything. Web apps. A web app is similar to some mobile apps and that they usually require a backend system of some sort.
But they aren't device specific, which makes them easier to push to more people faster and more cost-effectively. They're usually created when you don't need specific functionality from a device, like some of the hardware functionality, GPS, gyroscopes. That sort of thing. Though web browsers are providing more and more access to hardware functionality these days. Website. So the term website. Can be used to describe some web apps as well. For example, the Facebook website is an app.
It allows you to interact with it in complex ways. In our case, we reserve the term website for sites that aren't complicated in a functionality sense. They're either static presentational sites or they have common functionality like e-commerce or commenting that can be built with off the shelf tools. For e-commerce that might mean using a platform like Shopify or big commerce to name a few for content that might include platforms like Squarespace, WordPress. Wix or others. Desktop apps.
A desktop app is operating system specific, often uses faster, more efficient code. Has filed system access and typically tries to use your hardware as efficiently as possible. Desktop apps are suited for more computationally intensive work. Uh, think something like Photoshop or 3d software where you generally want to be able to access a graphics card or lower level systems that allow your app to run a lot faster. Automation.
Automation is a process where code is written to carry out a specific task without human interaction. Automations usually don't have a user interface. They're about moving data, creating alerts, that sort of thing . It doesn't have to be complicated. You can often use tools like Zapier or Make or plenty of other ones that have come out in the last few years. An example of a problem that might be solved by an automation is moving Salesforce data automatically into BigQuery.
So you can better work with it in Google data studio. If you've built an app. We'd love to know what you've built, why you built it, how you built it, what the process was, how you decided what you like to build. We'd really like to get your feedback on our process , and we always want to learn. So follow us if you want to keep up with this series, we have a lot to share with you.
And if you think that we could work together, we'd love to partner with you and see how we can help you move forward with your next project. Just shoot us an email hello@ephemerecreative.ca. We'll include that in the show notes if you're worried about the spelling. See you next time.