We went down the route of a web app for prowlr for a number of reasons:
- we are not as competent on apple coding as we would like to be
- we did not want to go through the apple store for update purposes (there are alot that goes on behind the scenes, we have already updated prowlr a number of times in the background for "bug fixes" that we have just rolled out, no apple involvement required.
- you have to pay to be licensed for SDK, something we did not want to do to start with as we were unaware how many users we would get
- apart from marketing the "app", once it is on your iphone/touch, there is very little difference between a web app and an actual app, they operate in the same way
obviously for a business this is different. a retail business more than likely has a marketing/advertising budget, so incorporate the app into that. i cant imagine making the app would be that expensive for professionals if you have ALL the content, the costs (i imagine) would be on the upkeep if you are unable to do this yourself. (for us this was not an option, we are just 3 friends who built the basis of the app for us, then when it worked we developed it into a released item. we are working on updates, and a new UI, but the main issue for us is there is not a reliable and openly availble API for the UK show dates)
you dont need to have an app for sliding, there are templates available for this, but if you want push, a native app is the only way of acheiving this.
good luck mate!
