Web App, Mobile App or Shop? How to Choose in 2026

"Do we need an app?" is often the first question a founder asks us, and usually the wrong place to start. The better question is what people need to do, on which device, and how often. The answer to that decides whether you need a web app, phone apps, a shop, or all three around one product.

We do web app development, cross-platform phone apps, online shops and AI features, and the electronics and firmware behind connected products. This guide is how we help clients choose, with the prices and rules that matter in Norway in 2026.

Start with the job, not the platform

Four questions settle most of the choice:

Where will people use it? At a desk, on the go, or both. Work tools live in the browser; things used daily on the move belong on the phone.
Does it need the phone itself? Bluetooth to a device, background location, reliable push notifications or offline use push you towards a phone app.
How will people find it? A web app can be found through Google and shared as a link. A phone app is found in the stores, which also take a share of what you sell inside it.
How will it make money? Selling products, subscriptions or services each lead to a different checkout and different rules.

Web apps: the default starting point

A web app runs in any browser, on any device, with one codebase and no store between you and your customers. You can ship a fix in minutes, and your public pages can be found in search. A Progressive Web App can also be installed on the home screen and work offline. On iPhone, web push notifications work only after the user has added the web app to the Home Screen, which Apple introduced in iOS 16.4. That is fine for tools people choose to install, and weak for mass-market notifications.

Good fit: business tools, dashboards, SaaS products, booking and customer portals, and anything people use at a desk.

Our own examples: TradeRitual, a live trading journal with broker sync and more than 40 analytics cards, is a web app. FreeTheTools, also live, runs tools such as PDF compression entirely in the browser, so files never leave the device.

Phone apps: native or cross-platform

When you need the phone itself, you build for iOS and Android. Few small teams need two separate native apps any more. Cross-platform tools build both from one codebase:

React Native with Expo: native screens with shared code, and a natural choice if the team already works in React on the web.
Flutter: one codebase for phone, web and desktop, with its own rendering, good for a strongly custom look.
Capacitor: wraps an existing web app so it can go into the stores and reach native features. A fast route when the web app comes first.
Tauri: small, fast desktop apps from web technology, now also targeting mobile.

The stores take their share. Apple charges USD 99 a year for its developer program and a standard 30% commission on digital sales outside the EU, or 15% for qualifying subscriptions and members of its Small Business Program. Google Play charges 15% on the first USD 1 million a year and 30% above that in most markets; the EEA has its own rates of 10 to 25%, and subscriptions are typically 15%. The EU now allows other ways to distribute and pay on iPhone, with their own terms and fees.

Our example, still in development: ARCIVE captures what you say on the web, on your phone or on a small dedicated device, all feeding one memory you can search and talk to. One team designed the apps, the back end and the device firmware together, which is what makes the pieces feel like one product.

Online shops: hosted or custom

Hosted: Shopify or WooCommerce

For a normal catalogue, shipping, discount codes and stock, a hosted platform is usually the right call. Shopify Basic costs NOK 289 a month billed yearly, with card rates from 2% + NOK 2, Shopify Payments is available to Norwegian stores, and Vipps is added through the official Vipps MobilePay app in the Shopify App Store. It adds Vipps at checkout but not as an express checkout button, and the app has its own price, so check it. WooCommerce is free and open source on top of WordPress, but you pay for hosting, extensions and upkeep.

Custom: when the shop is part of the product

Build your own checkout when the product logic is unusual: configurators, odd subscription rules, B2B pricing, marketplaces, or when the shop is one feature of a larger app. Then you take payments directly through Stripe (2.4% + NOK 2 for EEA cards) or Vipps MobilePay (payment links 2.49% + NOK 1, recurring payments 2.99% + NOK 1), and you own the tax, receipts and emails a hosted shop would handle.

Rules for selling to Norwegian consumers

Prices shown to consumers must include VAT (MVA), which is 25% for most goods.
Customers have a 14-day right of withdrawal (angrerett), counted from when they receive the goods.
If you leave out the required information about the right of withdrawal, the period can run up to 12 months longer. For services it counts from the contract, not delivery.
For digital content, such as downloads, the right of withdrawal can end once delivery starts, but only if the customer pays, expressly agrees that delivery starts now, acknowledges losing the right, and you confirm it.

Our example: Lanternfolk, which we are building now, is a set of ready-made quiz packs you buy and host anywhere. It is a digital product, so the withdrawal rules above shape the checkout we are building for it.

AI features that earn their place

AI is most useful when it removes a specific task. The patterns we use most:

Answers from your own content: search over your documents, products or history, with the answer citing where it came from.
Transcription and summaries: turning audio, meetings or long documents into text people can search and skim.
Sorting and extraction: reading emails, forms or receipts and filling in the fields a person used to type.
Assistants with tools: a chat that can actually do things in your system, within limits you set.

Running costs are per use and often small per request, but they grow with traffic. Models are priced per million tokens (roughly, pieces of words) of text: Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 costs USD 1 in and USD 5 out, and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite USD 0.10 and USD 0.40. Some simple tasks can even run in Chrome on the user's own device, though those browser features are still experimental, so do not depend on them for every user.

Our examples: ARCIVE answers questions grounded in your own recorded history, and Anyglot, also in development, turns any video, podcast or recording into a timestamped transcript in your language, streamed while it works.

Privacy basics for any app in Norway

If a supplier processes personal data for you (hosting, email, analytics, an AI provider), you need a data processing agreement with them, under GDPR Article 28.
Cookies and similar tracking need prior consent of the GDPR standard under section 3-15 of the Norwegian Electronic Communications Act, which replaced the old section 2-7b on 1 January 2025. Strictly necessary cookies are exempt.
Hosting in the EU or EEA lowers the paperwork for transferring data outside the EEA. It is not required for ordinary apps, but it is often the simplest answer.

How much does it cost to build an app?

We will not quote a price range here, because the answer depends on a handful of things you can usually see early:

How many platforms: web only, or web plus iOS and Android.
Integrations with systems you already use: accounting, CRM, brokers, booking.
Payments and subscriptions, and how unusual the rules are.
AI features, and how much they are used.
Content, languages and accessibility.
Compliance needs, from cookie consent to the AI Act.

A short first conversation usually narrows this down to a scope and an estimate you can plan with.

How we work

One team covers design, web and app development, back end, AI and, when there is hardware, the electronics and firmware too. That matters most where the pieces meet: the device and the app, the shop and the product, the AI and your own data. We start small, ship something real early, and build from what users do with it.

Frequently asked questions

Web app vs mobile app: which is better?

Start with a web app unless you need the phone itself: Bluetooth, background location, reliable push or offline use. Many products start on the web and add phone apps once people use them daily.

Can I turn my website into an app?

Often, yes. A web app can be installed as a PWA, and with Capacitor it can go into the App Store and Google Play. Apple expects an app to do more than a repackaged website, so it pays off when the site is already something people use, with a native feature such as notifications or the camera.

How do I add AI to a web app?

Start with one narrow task, such as answering from your own documents or filling in a form from an email. Call a model from your back end, keep a data processing agreement with the provider, and measure use before you widen it.

Shopify vs a custom online shop: which is better?

Shopify for a normal catalogue and a fast start. Custom when the product logic is unusual or the shop is part of a larger app.

Can I take Vipps in a Shopify store?

Yes, through the official Vipps MobilePay app in the Shopify App Store.

Do I have to tell users that they are talking to an AI?

Under the EU AI Act, yes: people must be told when they interact with an AI system, unless it is obvious.

Planning something?

See what we do in website and web app development, look at the projects behind the examples above, or book a short call and tell us what people need to do. We will tell you what we would build first.

Sources

Checked on 2 October 2026: