Difference Between Traditional Desktop Web apps and Mobile Apps
                     Difference Between Traditional Desktop 
Web apps and Mobile Apps
Paul Adam
Writer at Credible-reviews, creates 
content to attract  and engage visitors to 
Credible-reviews.com.
Over the past few years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of 
smartphones for internet usage. In some countries, the web traffic from 
smartphones and tabs have exceeded the desktop computers. To compete with 
the existing mobile market, businesses are developing mobile versions of their 
existing applications. Mobile apps provide the flexibility of operation from 
anyplace whereas desktop versions of applications have restricted mobility. 
Both these two versions have their own specific benefits and drawbacks. 
Though both use similar technologies, there are few fundamental differences 
between mobile and traditional desktop apps.
Thick vs Thin clients
Traditional web applications use thick or fat client where a client-server 
architecture or network typically provides application access. In this design, 
some parts of the application are accessed from the client while others can be 
accessed from the server. However, mobile apps use thin clients where the 
applications depend heavily on servers for its access. Since most of the thin 
clients have low energy processors, flash storage, or memory, mobile apps are 
slow when compared to desktop traditional apps.
Network Bandwidth
Bandwidth is a major drawback in mobile apps as many of them use only 
lower 3G or 4G internet connection speed. Since tradition web applications use 
high network bandwidths, they are much faster and have higher performance. 
The low bandwidth is one of the reasons that mobile apps have extended user 
sessions and poor response times.
Remote Data Access
While using mobile apps, the users need to face many unique challenges in 
terms of data access which are not found in server or desktop environments. 
Since the remote data for mobiles is accessed through network connections 
which travel from tower to tower, the performance is low when compared to 
traditional web apps.
Computing Ability
Since smartphones and PCs have different CPUs they have different processing 
powers and memory storage. Hence, the computing performance of both the 
devices are entirely different. Smartphone CPUs are generally smaller and have 
limited computing ability. As mobile apps have only limited processing powers 
their performance will be comparatively lower than the desktop web 
applications.
Touch vs Click
Desktop applications offer better user experience because mobile devices have 
touch based inputs which are not always effective. Mobile users need to use 
their fingers for navigation from one page to another whereas desktop 
applications use keyboard or a mouse. While it is easy to navigate using a 
mouse for desktops, small-screened mobile devices require precision in touch 
for navigation.
Data Restrictions
When you are using mobile apps on your smartphone, you need to track data 
usage to see which app is using the most. Generally, mobile networks charge 
for the data that consumers use. If you are using more mobile apps on your 
smartphone, then you may end up paying higher bills to your mobile service. 
This is not the case with desktop web applications because they use optimizing 
techniques for caching of data.
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