Picture a scenario I have watched play out more than once, a version of which crossed my desk twice in the last fortnight, almost word for word. A café owner on the Galway Quays gets talked into building an app. Not by a chancer. By a polished, reasonable-sounding pitch: your customers live on their phones, an app puts you on their home screen, loyalty stamps, push offers, the works. It sounds like the future. They sign off the bones of a year's marketing budget and wait.

Months pass. The app ships. It works fine. And almost nobody downloads it. The regulars already know where the café is. Tourists have moved on by the time the install finishes. The thing sits in two app stores gathering dust, demanding a paid update every time Apple or Google shifts something underneath it, while the website, the one a stranger actually finds on Google at half eight on a wet Tuesday, stays the tired afterthought it always was.

That is the trade most owners never see coming. They spent the money on the thing customers do not use and starved the thing they do.

The App Pitch Sounds Like the Future. It Is Mostly the Past.

"Every business needs an app" is not a new idea. It is a decade old, and for most small firms it was never true.

An app earns its keep when customers come back constantly, when they log in, when the relationship is daily. Online banking. Ride-hailing. The supermarket you order from every week. For that kind of business, a square on the home screen is genuinely worth fighting for.

Now think about the average local firm: a café, a salon, a solicitor, a plumber, a homeware shop. Each is a business a customer touches a handful of times a year, sometimes just once. You do not earn permanent residence on someone's phone with that frequency, no matter how clever the loyalty feature is. The pitch quietly assumes an engagement pattern that the owner-operator simply does not have.

I am cynical about this pitch because I have watched it cost good businesses real money for a return that was never coming. The hype is doing the selling, not the maths.

What an App Actually Costs, and Keeps Costing

Here is the part the pitch tends to skate over. An app is not one thing you buy once.

To reach everyone, you build for two different worlds, Apple's and Google's. That is either two separate builds or one cross-platform build that still needs constant minding, because both platforms change the rules under you every year. Miss an update window and the app that worked in spring throws errors by autumn.

Then there are the tolls. Apple charges ninety-nine euro a year, every year, just to keep an app listed in its store, as it spells out plainly in its developer programme terms. Google takes a smaller one-off fee, around twenty-five dollars, to register. Those are the entry fees before a single line of your actual app is written or maintained. Neither store is a passive shelf, either. Both run a review process, and both can reject your app or pull it later if it falls foul of a policy you did not know existed. You are renting space in someone else's shop, on their terms.

The build itself typically runs into the thousands, often the bones of what a proper website costs, and the maintenance never stops. Compare that to what a business website actually costs in Ireland, where the ongoing figure can be a single flat annual fee with nothing else to chase.

Here is the agitation, plainly. The app bill arrives again next year whether forty people use it or four. That is money walking out of the business for a tool sitting unopened, on the exact same morning a customer is bouncing off your slow or missing website and ringing a competitor instead.

Even if you build it, the app is fighting for space on a phone that is already full.

The Phone Is Already Full

Even if you build the app, you are fighting for space that is already taken.

People do not collect apps any more. They live in a handful: messaging, maps, banking, one or two social feeds. Everything else is install fatigue. By AppsFlyer's own measurement, across tens of billions of installs, only around a quarter of the people who install an app are still opening it the day after, and by the thirty-day mark that has usually collapsed to the low single digits. Those numbers swing hard by category and country, so treat them as a shape rather than a precise figure. The shape is brutal enough.

Now layer on the obvious. Nobody opens the App Store and searches "café in Galway". Google Play is not where anyone goes hunting for a local solicitor either. App stores are where you land for an app you already decided you wanted. They are not where a person discovers a local business for the first time.

So the app you paid for does not get found, does not get opened, and does not bring in the stranger who has never heard of you. Which raises the only question that really matters.

Where Your Customers Actually Are

When someone needs what you sell, they do one thing first. They search.

They type your trade and their town into Google, on the phone, in the moment they are ready to spend. A website is the only thing that meets them there. It is the storefront that turns "I wonder if anywhere near me does this" into a phone call or a booking.

So before you judge any solution, app or otherwise, here is the bar the right one has to clear. It has to be found where customers already look, which means the open web and search. Ownership matters: the thing has to be yours, not rented inside a platform that can rewrite the rules overnight. Speed matters too, because load slowly and the stranger is already gone. The running cost has to be low enough that you are not paying a yearly toll for tools nobody touches. And it should bend to take a booking, a payment or an enquiry without a developer on call.

That bar is exactly why the open web still wins for most businesses. WordPress, which W3Techs puts at more than four in ten of all websites, somewhere around forty-three percent, though I would treat any tidy single number about the whole internet with caution, is the proven way to clear it. It is found on Google, it stays yours, and it bends to whatever your business needs. An Instagram page, by contrast, is not a website you own, and it never will be.

The old barrier is gone, too. You no longer need a designer and a five-figure budget to get a real site live. Describe your business to Web60's AI builder and a professional WordPress site is live in under a minute, running on tuned Irish infrastructure, with hosting, SSL, nightly backups, security and a real Irish support team all in for sixty euro a year. In plain terms, the customer searching at half eight on that wet Tuesday lands on a fast page that loads before they lose patience, rather than a spinner or a dead link. That is the spend that pays you back.

When customers need you, they search. A website is the one thing waiting there.

When an App Genuinely Earns Its Place

I am not saying apps are useless. That would be its own kind of hype, just pointing the other way.

If your business runs on high-frequency, repeat engagement, an app can absolutely earn its square on the home screen. Think of a busy takeaway where regulars reorder the same thing every week, a gym built on class bookings and member check-ins, or a loyalty operation people genuinely open every day. For those, the engagement is real and the app pays for itself. If that is you, build it, or better still use a proven third-party booking or ordering platform rather than commissioning one from scratch.

There is a middle ground worth knowing about as well. A modern website can be saved to a phone's home screen and opened much like an app, no app store required, which gives many businesses the "on their phone" feeling without the two-store tax.

Let me be straight about the one thing a website still cannot match, though. A native app can fire a push notification to a phone in a way the browser, especially on an iPhone, still does not do reliably. If your entire model depends on pinging customers with an offer and having it appear on their lock screen, that is the genuine case for going native. For most local firms, it is not the deciding factor. A handful will find it is. Know which one you are before you spend.

Spend Where the Customers Already Are

The café on the Quays did not have a bad idea. It had the wrong order of priorities. The money went to the home screen, which stayed empty, instead of to the search result, where the customers actually were.

Strip away the pitch and the decision is calm enough. Most businesses are found, judged and chosen on the open web, by a stranger with a phone and a question. Put your money there first. Make that page fast, owned and easy to act on. If you later turn out to be one of the rare firms whose customers really would open an app every day, you will know, because the demand will be loud and obvious, and you can build it then from a position of strength rather than hope.

The home screen is a lovely place to be. It is just not where the next customer is looking for you today.