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Miles Corran · 
One of the first questions in any education app project is where it should live. A website, an Android app, an iPhone app, or all of them at once? It shapes the budget and what the first version can do.
We’ve shipped learning products on both the web and Google Play: Finance Brain, CertBrain and the flashcard game Brain Defense. Here’s how we think about the choice.
What the web is good for
A website is where people find you. Someone searching for help with an exam, or for a free course on a topic, lands on a web page, not an app store listing. A lesson, a sample question or a free diagnostic can be read and tried in seconds, with nothing to install.
That makes the web the natural front door for most learning products:
- Search. Lessons and articles can be found and linked to. An app’s screens can’t.
- No commitment. A visitor can try something before deciding to sign up. CertBrain’s readiness diagnostic works this way on the web: no account, scored in the browser, results straight away.
- One release, everywhere. A change ships to every visitor at once, with no store review in between.
What a phone is good for
A phone is where habits form. Spaced repetition, short lessons and daily practice all work best in small, frequent sessions, and the device people carry all day is the one they’ll open in a spare five minutes.
The CertBrain app leans into that: short lessons, each followed by a quiz, spaced-repetition reviews, progress through each course and a daily streak. Each of those works best as something you open for a few minutes most days.
An app also has costs a website doesn’t. Each store has its own review, listing and policies, and some bugs only show up on a real device. Before submitting Finance Brain, we caught a button whose text was clipped because a custom font loaded late, bold text falling back to the system font, and a blank band above the tab bar.
When to start with one
For most learning products, we’d suggest starting on the web unless there’s a clear reason not to. It’s where people discover you, it’s the quickest to change while you’re still learning what works, and it lets you test your content and pricing ideas with the widest audience.
Start with a phone app if the product only makes sense in short, daily sessions, if it needs something only a phone offers, or if your learners are already used to installing apps for this kind of thing.
Both Finance Brain and CertBrain started on the web and added Android afterwards. Brain Defense started as a game inside the Braineos website and later became its own Android app. It’s Android only for now: the same setup should build for iPhone, but it hasn’t been built or tested there yet. Adding a platform later is normal, as long as the first one was built with that in mind.
Keeping both in step
Once a product is on more than one platform, learners expect it to feel like one product. That means a few things have to be true from the start.
One account. On Finance Brain and CertBrain, signing in with the same Google account on the web and the phone gives you the same progress in each. Brain Defense has its own store listing and icon, but it signs in to the same Braineos account and plays the same decks.
The server holds the truth. Progress, content and access rules live on the server, and both the website and the app ask it. Brain Defense needed no new backend endpoints, because the game already asked the server for a deck’s questions, and the server already checked who could study which deck. CertBrain’s diagnostic questions come from the server too, so the app doesn’t hard-code how many there are, and the website and app always ask the same set.
The same rules in both places. When the app does something the website also does, it should do it the same way. The diagnostic’s scoring in the CertBrain app is a port of the website’s, with its tests ported too, so both count the same answers the same way. The rule that decides whether a site leads with courses is the same on the web and in the app, so they always agree about what kind of product they are.
One place for shared wording. CertBrain says it isn’t an AWS product on every course and lesson page, in the same words on the website, the app and the store listing. That sentence lives in one place, so there’s one place to change it.
Know where people come from. New Finance Brain accounts record where they signed up: on the web, in the mobile app, or through an AI assistant. That’s how you find out whether a second platform is bringing in new learners or just serving the same ones in a new place.
One codebase, more than one app
The other thing that makes “both” affordable is not building each product twice. Finance Brain and CertBrain are built from the same web codebase as Braineos, and their Android apps from one shared mobile codebase. The Finance Brain launch took real work to make the app serve more than one product. By the time CertBrain went to Google Play, it was mostly configuration, plus one new feature: the diagnostic you can take before signing in.
If you’re weighing up where your learning product should start, and what it would take to add the next platform later, our education apps page sets out how we approach it.
