Q&A: We can’t afford to build a website AND app for our LMS. What are the low-cost app alternatives?

We’re ready to ditch our Thinkific setup and build our own Learning Management System to help us deliver the best experience for our 15,000+ users. While we’re confident that an app would improve engagement, desktop usage clearly surpasses mobile in our industry. 

We simply don’t have the budget to build both a browser-based LMS and a mobile-based LMS from day one. App builders, while cost-effective, don’t keep up with the changes we make on the browser app, and we’ve found that they result in a disparity between the browser and mobile. So I am curious to hear your thoughts on app alternatives that we can implement during the initial phase (with the intent on building a proper app later)?

Typically businesses want to build a mobile app for their elearning to help drive engagement, improve the accessibility of their content, open up to third-world countries, enable offline access, and to support micro-learning delivery methods. But many of these benefits are not exclusive to mobile apps and can be achieved through alternative means, which I’ll get onto shortly.