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If you still haven’t noticed how technology makes our lives easier instantly, here’s a modern-life challenge: try ordering a taxi by calling a dispatch phone number or the nearest taxi stand.

Assuming that still exists… it’s used far less than it was ten years ago. The habit of ordering by phone became obsolete because, as technology advanced, we started making requests through websites and, more recently, through apps.

And it’s apps that can increase repeat usage of your services when those services are offered digitally, for a number of reasons.

Push notifications

One of them is “push notifications”—messages shown on the smartphone screen (or on the computer, in some cases) even when the user isn’t using the app at that moment.

To understand it better, think about Uber: you open your phone, go to your apps folder, and tap the Uber icon. It opens a screen showing it already knows where you are (since it can access your smartphone GPS) and you can request a car in basically two taps: choose the ride type and confirm. In moments, your ride is on the way.

Before that, you needed to create an account in the app, also in just a few taps. That shows the experience is fast and offers an equally agile, satisfying response to the need you had when you opened the app.

The advantage of push notifications can also be seen, for example, in the relationship between WhatsApp and email: even though email is massively used worldwide, it’s much faster to read a message that arrives on WhatsApp than to open your email inbox.

One doesn’t replace the other, but the speed of information may be what creates panic in a country where WhatsApp goes down for a few hours while few people actually know whether an email outage is an email server problem or an internet connectivity issue.

This illustrates how our perception of digitally delivered services tends to prioritize what gives us fast answers to immediate needs.

Services that want higher repeat usage should keep this dynamism in mind—something that is currently more present in apps than on websites.

Apps vs. websites

As Uber, iFood, and other on-demand apps show, today the app is the fastest way to purchase a service.

Because it’s already installed and uses information you’ve already provided—like your location or your credit card—an app can complete a transaction faster than a website.

On a website, the user needs to wait for the page to load and, depending on the request, click through multiple steps to finish the order. That still works, of course, but it’s undeniable that an app generates much higher engagement.

In fact, the main reason big apps like Uber and Snapchat don’t want to “migrate” from app to website is that the app experience is simpler, with fewer steps and faster results.

Imagine opening your computer, typing Uber’s address, waiting for the site to load, logging in, waiting while it loads your location information (after asking for permission), and still having to enter payment details manually inside the platform. By the time you complete those tasks, you’d probably have gone outside and hailed a taxi.

Examples like this show that it doesn’t always make sense to offer some services only through a website—sometimes the site doesn’t even need to exist.

Final considerations

Apps build habits through simplified user experiences. Services that want to grow repeat usage should create that habit for each user.

For people to buy into it, the app must be simple, fast, and intuitive, and users should feel that when hiring the service it offers.

Because ordering a service through an app is so simple, this “task” becomes part of our daily routine, making us quickly forget the time when we used the phone to order a taxi, a snack, or even a motorcycle courier.

However, “Apps vs. websites” is still not an epic battle: there’s room for both, and what will define the best path for your company is good judgment and a real evaluation of both platforms.

If you want to learn more about how apps can increase repeat usage of your services, talk to X-Apps. We have solutions that can turn your idea into the next successful app.