For years I’ve seen business paying tens of thousands of dollars to have a website developed and they still have to pay for the site to be updated/maintained. This always frustrated me especially with great open source tools like WordPress. Now a similar frustration is happening in the mobile application space.

The common wisdom these days if you are a business owner is ‘We need an app’. This wisdom should be challenged especially with the recent developments in web technologies. Mobile app development can be expensive and you have to create and maintain an app for each device’s operating system (iOS for Apple, Blackberry, Windows, Android, etc). And if customers don’t have a need to check your site on a regular basis they probably won’t want to install an app just for your business. But if you still insist on an app there is a better way to go about it. So most likely you don’t need an app. Even Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google agrees.

Technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript allow you to develop a website that acts like a mobile app when viewed from a device and with PhoneGap the same code can be used to create an app. And with this design you can also have an app but it would use the same code as your website. With tools like jQTouch you can also have all the slick functionality of an app (slides, flips, touch, etc). Most sites that aren’t developed for a mobile device are hard to view and use on a mobile device, giving way to a negative view about mobile websites. But jQTouch and other technologies along with better design has changed the landscape (pardon the pun!).

Technologies like PhoneGap blur the line between app and website even further. It allows you to leverage your website content and build an app around it, while giving you access to the devices features such as GPS, Accelerometer, Contacts, etc. You might still need an app if you are creating a game or you want to sell your app on Apple’s App Store (which most businesses wouldn’t).

So if you’re considering a mobile app for your business make sure you aren’t dealing with the bias of the app developer and that you leverage your online content and recent technologies.