Technology & Implementation5 min read
Your visitor walks up to a museum entrance, QR code plastered on the sign. They scan it. Your app-based guide loads—and immediately asks them to download something.
Half your audience leaves. Not because your museum isn't interesting. Because they won't download an app.
The data is brutal: typical museum app download rates sit at 2–5% of visitors. Your guide could be exceptional, but it'll never reach 95% of people if you hide it behind the app store. Most museums have already accepted this. They're moving on.
It's not snobbery. It's friction, accumulated across every practical reason someone might hesitate.
Storage anxiety is real. The average person has a phone that's nearly full. Museum apps aren't tiny. That 150MB install doesn't feel worth it for a two-hour visit. They'd delete it tomorrow anyway. Why bother?
Trust is absent. You're a museum, not a household name in software. Why should they trust you with phone permissions? Location access, photos, contact lists—app stores ask for everything now. A visitor isn't going to root through privacy settings to download your guide.
International visitors face different app stores. Your guide built for iOS and Android works beautifully for UK and US visitors. Someone from China, where app store access differs radically, hits a wall. Same for people using tablets their kids gave them, running older OS versions, or phones with custom ROMs. The friction multiplies.
Time pressure matters. You have maybe 30 seconds to convince someone at the entrance. "Scan this QR code and enjoy our guide" is fast. "Scan this QR code, download our app, create an account, grant permissions, wait for installation" isn't. They're already in the museum—they want to start exploring.
Connection assumptions break. Apps need initial setup with a network connection. What if your museum is in a rural area? What if the wifi barely reaches the entrance? They download in the car park and blame your guide.
Web-based guides sidestep every single one of these obstacles.
A web-based AI audio guide loads instantly when you scan the QR code. No installation. No permissions screen. No account creation wall. Just your guide, running directly in the browser.
This sounds simple because it is. But the implications are enormous.
Your adoption rate jumps to 15–20% of visitors immediately. Some places see higher. The friction has vanished. Someone who wouldn't install anything now has a working guide in four seconds.
You reach international visitors without app store complexity. A visitor from Japan can scan and use your guide the same way a local does. No region-locking, no OS fragmentation, no download waiting.
Here's where people assume you're sacrificing capability. "Sure, web's easier, but don't you lose offline support? Push notifications? Home screen icons?"
Modern web technology—Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)—closes nearly all of that gap.
Offline functionality. Your web guide can cache all content—audio files, transcripts, maps, images—on first load. Visitors explore offline for hours. The app store provides nothing here that PWAs can't match.
Home screen installation. Visitors can add your guide to their home screen with one tap. It launches like a native app. No browser address bar, no back button—just your interface, full screen. Android and iOS both support this.
Push notifications (when you want them). You can send timed notifications during the visit: "You're near the Renaissance gallery. Try the audio guide there." This works in PWAs exactly like apps.
Geolocation awareness. Your guide knows where the visitor is standing and responds—showing the nearest exhibit, auto-playing relevant audio, skipping sections they've already passed. PWAs access this the same way apps do.
Payments and timed access. You can charge for premium guides, set expiry times, and restrict access by date or visitor group. No app required. All of this runs browser-side.
What you genuinely don't get with PWAs: deep OS integration (widgets, background processing on iOS, full home screen customization on Android) and app store distribution. That's it. For single-venue museums, you lose almost nothing. You gain audience reach instead.
Think in percentages.
A museum with 1,000 daily visitors using an app-based guide reaches 20–50 people with the audio tour. (2–5% adoption.)
The same museum with a web-based guide reaches 150–200 people. (15–20% adoption.)
That's 3–5x more visitors experiencing your carefully crafted narratives. That's the difference between a marginal project and a core part of your visitor experience.
Move to a PWA with offline and notifications, and you're often looking at higher engagement metrics too. Visitors use the guide more deeply when it's effortless to access.
Not much.
App store visibility. You won't appear in search results when someone looks for "museum audio guide" in the App Store. In practice, this doesn't matter. Your visitors don't search app stores looking for random museums. They arrive at your venue and look for a guide there.
Dedicated app reviews. Some museums care about five-star ratings in the App Store. Visitors rating your guide there versus on your website changes nothing about the experience. You get feedback both ways; the venue just shifts.
Automatic app updates on the visitor's device. Your guide can update via your web server, instantly, without anyone reinstalling anything. This is actually better.
Measurable abandonment rates specific to app installation. You lose some data granularity. You gain a much larger sample size because 95% of people now actually try the guide.
Single-venue museums—the vast majority—don't need an app. Your guide lives at a QR code. Visitors scan. They use. They leave. Done.
Multi-venue chains might want an app to aggregate guides across locations. Even then, a PWA shortcut to your web platform covers this entirely. The business case for a dedicated app erodes faster each year as browser technology improves.
Q: Won't visitors complain about no app?
A: Almost never. Visitors want simplicity. A guide that works instantly beats one with install friction. Museum operators occasionally feel uneasy about perceived professionalism without an app. Visitors don't notice or care. The 20x larger audience using your guide (because it has no download barrier) matters more than the 0.1% who wish you had an app to rate.
Q: What about offline audio after they leave the building?
A: Cache the full experience on first visit. They can review it on the train home, on their couch, next week. PWAs handle this. They don't need an app for it.
Q: Can a web guide really handle 5,000 concurrent visitors?
A: Web infrastructure is built for scale. Your guide runs client-side—no server strain from playback or interactions. Server load is minimal (content delivery, analytics, maybe authentication). A properly built web guide scales trivially. Apps hit the exact same server bottleneck with more overhead. If anything, web scales better.
Q: What about preserving the guide after the visit? Don't people want to keep the app?
A: Most visitors delete museum apps within a week. Your guide isn't precious software; it's a museum experience. They remember the visit because of what they learned, not because they kept an icon on their home screen. A PWA shortcut lasts just as long if someone wants it, and the data cost is zero.
readTimeMinutes: 5 audience: b2b
The app download era for museums is ending. Adoption rates were always the symptom of a deeper problem—friction where there shouldn't be any. Web-based guides aren't a compromise. They're the practical choice that reaches your actual audience.
If you're building or maintaining a museum guide, ask yourself: do I want 50 engaged users or 200? The answer determines your technology. The device your visitor brought to the museum—their phone—already has everything they need. Stop asking them to install something they don't want.
Interested in exploring a web-based audio guide for your venue? Let's talk.