Do we build the mobile app, or stay web-only?

Every few weeks someone emails me asking for a mobile app. Not a suggestion — a request, sometimes a demand.

They want to use it on the train, in bed, away from the laptop, and they tell me they'd use it way more if it existed.

A mobile app sounds like the obvious answer. It's where attention lives now, it's a permanent icon on their home screen, and it opens up push notifications, offline access, and a whole category of use cases the web just can't touch.

It's also a second product. A separate codebase, a separate design language, a separate release cycle, two app stores with their own review processes and rejection emails, and a permanent maintenance tax that never goes away. Every feature I ship on web now has to be shipped twice, or I have to explain why the app is behind.

And the honest fear is that most of the people asking will download it, open it twice, and never touch it again — because the thing they actually want is a better mobile web experience, which I could fix in a week instead of a year.

Have you built the app? Did it actually change how people use the product, or did you end up maintaining two mediocre versions of the same thing?