Flipkart Rolls Out Mobile Website; No More App-Only Strategy

It has reintroduced a mobile web option – something it had discontinued in March. That’s a change of strategy for Flipkart, which earlier this year dropped its mobile site in favor of its mobile app. The new mobile web application, however, is an extremely light version, and provides an app-like experience. In a first, Flipkart’s engineers worked closely with engineers at Google, to enhance the ability of Google’s Chrome browser to make websites as powerful as mobile applications.

Christened as “Flipkart Lite”, the app-like mobile website is said to have been optimized for low-speed data connections in India.

It is also being said that the new mobile browser experience has been built by the company completely using the Chrome development tools. “We gave Chrome a list of functionalities, which if they supported, could help us create a web application that worked like a native application”.

The Recode piece quotes Peeyush Ranjan, VP of Engineering at Flipkart who said that apps have the advantages of a cleaner interface and the advantage to stay offline. “On the mobile site, none of these things are possible”. For consumers, this also indicates that shopping won’t necessarily mean installing another app, but could be a matter of choice between an app or the good old browser. You have to download them and you have to keep updating. “Our mobile web app offers the benefits and superior experience of the app without the limitations”. Also, the new mobile website comes with features like push notifications and home screen access which are quite similar to those found in the app. But the full Flipkart experience is still available only on our native app. And the focus is not on traffic. The main reason for launching our web app is we don’t want to compromise on the user experience for people who come to us on the mobile web.

It appears that through the whole controversy around its app only strategy, Flipkart had lost out on an opportunity to convey to its user base that it really cared for its customers and would go the extra mile to ensure that they could continue to shop on the platform of their choice where they were most comfortable. The homepage looks more “Google-like” with a search engine at the centre.