What’s the Deal with Web Apps?

By Meredith Peng

So you’re thinking of building an app. Maybe you’re an ambitious entrepreneur, ready to go to market with a cool new concept. Or perhaps you run an offline business and are thinking of tapping into new growth channels. Where do you start? Do you build for Android? iOS? Both? Isn’t hiring engineers expensive?

Besides, what if your little app experiment doesn’t take off? How will you justify the large initial investment of building the app in the first place?

What if I told you that there is a simpler, more cost effective way to kick off that growth you’re seeking? And that this growth channel is rapidly growing in popularity among big and small companies alike?

Introducing the web app. This little guy isn’t a native app, but it isn’t a simple web page either. It’s somewhere in between, and it’ll change the way you do business.

Now that we have your attention…

Let’s quickly go over why web apps rock. Cue the timer.

• You don’t need to differentiate between Android vs. iOS. That’s right. No headaches from different OS versions. Just hire one team of web developers and you’re good to go.
• Take advantage of SEO and social sharing. Customer acquisition is one of the woes of native apps. With web apps, there are no downloads necessary for new users to try out your product. That can be a dealbreaker for users with low phone memory — a common case in emerging markets. So instead of burning your hard-earned marketing dollars on convincing users who can’t fit a new app on their phone, try out some SEO and SEM tactics while tapping into social media to take your web app to market.
• Don’t worry about app releases. With native apps, your team must submit any new versions of your app to the app store anytime you want to release new features or fix bugs. This can make experimentation and new feature releases extremely costly, as well as time-consuming. Rather than wait weeks for user adoption, you can roll out changes instantaneously with web apps. A/B test away. 👍
• Integrate to the greater ecosystem. With web apps, there are an abundance of new tools and opportunities to grow your business. Hundreds of web APIs are at your fingertips to enhance user experience and introduce new functionality to your app. Platforms like Gojek’s third-party platform also offer opportunities for companies to grow by simply integrating their web apps — instantly gaining access to millions of users.

Convinced? Cool. Now let’s get into the exciting bits. Let’s say you have a web app. Now, how do you grow it?

Haaave you met our Super App? 😉

Gojek now offers a suite of services and tools via its own platform for accepted partners to level up their web apps. This platform integrates partners to the Gojek app itself through a host of integration solutions. By integrating to Gojek’s platform, partners can bring their user experience even closer to a native app experience while instantly expanding their potential user pool to the millions of daily active Gojek users that the app boasts. We offer a host of APIs so that you don’t have to worry about user authentication or payment methods. Simply integrate with GoLogin to let users create accounts on your site using their Gojek credentials, and integrate with Gopay’s API to pay seamlessly via GoPay. Have a host of products you offer on the daily? Now, Gojek offers an eCommerce solution — GoMall — which makes cataloguing and finding products on our platform even easier.

Gojek is also working closely with Google to make developing web apps even easier. We strongly believe in performance culture, and are making available the first localised tooling in Indonesia for partners to easily check the performance and status of their own web apps against local network conditions.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re pushing forward in creating a Gojek Developer Certification, to ensure standards of web development and to help train a new generation of Indonesian web developers.

So, what’s next? Hopefully you’ve already started building a web app after reading the first half of this blog post. If you’re located in Indonesia and are interested in integrating with Gojek’s platform, now’s a great time. Fear not, we provide extensive support and documentation to get your web app off the ground. Also keep a lookout for public workshops and hackathons from Gojek’s platform team and Google’s web team. Our platform is growing, and who knows, yours might be the next big Gojek product!

Want to learn more? Email us at goplatform@go-jek.com and we’ll let you know of more opportunities to engage with Gojek and grow with us!