I am currently developing a large ecommerce website and I also need to develop an Android and iPhone app. To save time and overall costs I thought that I would just make the Android app simply a container that loads the html5 website in a simplified version of the full website pages.
I’ve just checked and Apple don’t allow this functionality and Apple have said that they will most likely reject it and not allow it onto their marketplace. Looks like I’m going to have to create a full blown Apple app as well as develop a mobile version of my website.
Will the Android marketplace also reject my app on the basis that it will merely be a container for my website and not a full blown app ?
Does anyone have any experience of this on the Android marketplace ? I’d be grateful for any advice or experience any of you guys have had.
No, that’s perfectly fine in the Android Marketplace / Play store. The Play store doesn’t have an approval process as such, they just have developer guidelines (which don’t say anything about publishing “containers” for mobile sites) and a pro-active scanning of published apps for viruses and malware.
There are services whose single purpose is to do exactly that (e.g. Appgeyser). They turn a (mobile) website into an Android app that’s publishable on the Google Play store.
Keep in mind that a “native” app is almost always more user-friendly and usually seen more positively by users. Depending on whether the iOS/Android app is central to your e-commerce site’s strategy, I would opt for a native Android app (which probably isn’t much more work if you’ve by then already developed a native iOS version).