One of the best ways for your app to be successful is to have a presence on mobile. If you intend to use mobile apps to interact with your customers, you must deliver an excellent customer experience. In order to guarantee that great experience, most mobile experiences today are delivered through native applications.

This blog post will walk you through how to migrate a web app (HTML5) to a native Android application.

Remember the customer experience

When migrating a web app, it’s important to maintain a positive customer experience. Keep the following in mind:

• Encourage the existing web app users to download and start using the new native app
• Remove the web app from the Appstore so only the native app will be available

How to get started

Migration from web app to native app consists of the following main steps:

Assumptions:

• You will submit a different app for the native app (this will not be an upcoming version of the web app).
• The web app and native app will have different ASINs.
• As it is going to be a different app with a different package name, the new app won’t store any data saved within the web app.

1. Submit a new native app
2. Submit an updated version of the web app which would include a zip file of the web content
3. The updated web content should have a link to the native app that customers can click on (click here for the step-by-step guide on how to how to handle app updates)
4. When you update the web app in the Developer Portal, also update the icons of the app to help visually indicate to the customers that this app is deprecated (so it is visually different than the live version)
5. You should send a request to Amazon either using the contact us form or getting in touch with your Amazon point of contact in order to suppress the web app. Once it is suppressed, new customer will not be able to see it or search for that version of the app. Existing customers will still see the suppressed app in their library and if the app is installed on a device, it will not be uninstalled.