Andrew Yu, founder of Modo Labs, provided a nice write up about different ways universities are providing content and functionality to their visitors who use mobile devices.

The article helps illustrate the challenges that universities face in selecting and implementing the best approach. For example, native apps for iOS and Android devices are sleek, speedy and can leverage native phone functions (like GPS, camera, calendar and SMS) more effectively, but they are more costly and time-consuming to maintain. A well-designed responsive web site provides an improved mobile experience for all platforms (smartphone, tablet, and desktop/laptop) and benefits from a single, unified code base and centralized content. Its dependence on the web for data retrieval can slow things down somewhat. Standalone mobile apps are somewhere in the middle, but may or may not be a worthwhile compromise. In any case, it’s a place to start the conversation about how we combine responsive web site design, standalone mobile web sites and mobile apps into a unified campus strategy for mobile.