Mobile Apps: the flip-side of using Responsive Design

When a website is of responsive design, the entire content automatically adapts itself to the size of the screen. There are four different screen sizes that responsive design caters to – desktop monitor, laptop monitor, tablet and mobile phones.

The website owners understandably want their visitors to have the best viewing experience possible regardless of the devices they may be using. The one argument in favour of responsive design is it eliminates the necessity for multiple versions of the same site.

Besides, it is neither practicable nor sustainable to develop customized sites or applications to suit the screen sizes of each of the four different devices. Responsive design is a manner of managing the layout changes so that the content is displayed on any size screen.

Admittedly, there are some technical and other snags when opting for responsive design.

• Responsive design employs a single set of code and hence users of mobile devices have to download the same quantum of content as a desktop user. Thus, the user is forced to download a lot of unwanted content that they may never want.

• Businesses must certainly ponder over the time and resources needed for responsive design. The tech team may not have the time and the resources to undertake the responsive design project with all its attendant complexities.

• Rescaling desktop images for a mobile screen can be troublesome particularly for online advertisers. There are standard sizes for display ads and altering their size could distort the images and advertisers will surely be annoyed.

• The general complaint as regards rescaling desktop pages for mobile screens is a lot of scrolling will be needed particularly if the page contents are lengthy.

• If you choose to adopt responsive design, you cannot update the desktop site without considering the impact it will have on all other devices. This will demand quite a bit of testing and may interfere with your ability to react quickly to problems.

• Images will pose serious problems to mobile developers as any image that suits a large desktop screen will not be right for a small smartphone screen. For a smartphone screen where space is a constraint, you will have to settle for a smaller close up image. Further, you will be wasting bandwidth minimizing a desktop image for a smartphone screen.

• Images will pose serious problems to mobile developers as any image that suits a large desktop screen will not be right for a small smartphone screen. For a smartphone screen where space is a constraint, you will have to settle for a smaller close up image. Further, you will be wasting bandwidth minimizing a desktop image for a smartphone screen.