Making an online presence for your business can be tricky, yet, very important for increasing your odds of success. Therefore, web development has become highly demanding and has been increasingly evolving in the last decade. There are new tools and opportunities to help people create web apps. This has compelled several myths to spring up in the community. As a result, outsiders and beginners misinterpret this field and often do everything wrong or quit because of false assumptions. But don’t worry, we won’t let these myths get in the way of your incredible journey. With that being said, here are the 7 web app myths you absolutely should know about.
Myth #1: The higher the website traffic, the bigger revenue.
The first web myth is about the connection between traffic and revenue. Website traffic has become the main focus of many web app owners. Teams try to come up with engaging ideas to increase the traffic of their web apps. If succeeded, they will showcase their hard work on the first page of SERP and tada! More traffic and more fuss around their content. You might think, with such a scenario, your hard work is paid off, and you will get tons of money while on it.
We are truly sorry to break it to you, higher website traffic doesn’t always mean bigger revenue. Decision making is a complex process. Your non-paying users will end up revising your web app, compare the features you offer to those of competitors. This process might take days and sometimes weeks. Eventually, if they find your products meet their need the most, they’ll convert and become paging users.

Yet, there are some ways out of the situation. First of all, find and target your potential customers through offering features, products that truly meet their needs. That’s the best way to connect with your potential users for them to become committed to your brand. Then present your products via such entertaining and informative content that will make the temptation of wondering and trying your web app irresistible. To start debunking this application software myth, here is a great article to get you hooked and ready to work on your revenue and turn your customers to brand advocates.
Myth #2: Web App Security is not a priority before the release.
Running a web application can be a complicated process because of security attacks that make protecting web apps and online services highly important. When the web app is released, teams start looking for vulnerabilities, bugs and try to secure their web apps from information theft, damaged client relationships, and legal proceedings.
But do web developers start caring about the security of their products only after they have been released? Well, if you believe this web app myth to be true, your application automatically becomes the ideal material for web application attacks. So, we highly recommend considering the security perpetrators at the very beginning of your web app development process. Before release, you should have a clear framework and work on your security posture, with the SDLC, throughout the process of the web app building.
Before we jump on to the next web app development myth, here are some tips to accompany SDLC and reduce security risks:
- If you have a team, make sure your team works with OWASP Top Ten - a guide on the most critical risks for web apps’ security. Also, make sure to hire a QA who will be responsible for finding any bugs in the web app’s infrastructure.
- Prioritize having good encryption for users’ passwords. Password encryption scrambles the passwords making them unreadable by hackers. Google recommends using stronger hashing algorithms such as SHA-256 and SHA-3. Other options commonly used in practice are bcrypt, scrypt.
- Secure your web app with SSL certification. It's important because SSL certification allows you to move from HTTP to HTTPS, which is more secure.
There are dozens of other things you should implement regarding the security of your web app. We find these to be highly prioritized ones to take into consideration first. Think of it as a process that demands continuous assessment to decrease the overall risk and increase its production.
Myth #3: Coding skills are enough for web app building.
Everything you read and watch online is all made of code. So, of course, if you’re going to put something on the Internet, in the most classic way, knowing how to code is important, but it’s not enough. In other words, application software development is quickly becoming more complex. It requires an increasing, and ever-evolving set of skills.
As already mentioned, web app building is not successful if we focus only on one aspect of it. Take coding as the essence of web development. Other primary skills and knowledge are UX/UI, onboarding flow, conversion optimization and more. All surely start with coding but end in a completely different direction and set of information to digest. This is mainly why coding is highly important but is not and never will be enough for web app development.
Myth #4: Amazing features bring automatic success.
To first identify this statement as another application software myth, we need to understand the main components of web apps and how important they are for success.

So, the main components of the web apps are:
- UI/UX includes user management, onboarding, dashboards, notifications, etc.
- Client and server sides a.k.a. structural components.
To have a functioning web app, these two components, with dozens of things attached to them, should run perfectly. Even if all the components function greatly, the success won't come to you automatically. You have to work hard on your web app to make it easy to use and make sure your products/features solve customers’ issues.
To learn more about the nerdiest and juiciest stuff on web app building, check out the article about components, models, and types of web application architecture.
Lastly, having amazing features solely doesn’t bring success. So instead of focusing on the amazement factor, how about you start working on features your potential customers will love and need. Only when you start mixing and maintaining all the previously mentioned factors, that’s when your software application myth turns into a fact.
Myth #5: Mobile Apps are more practical compared to web apps.
Image Source: Springboard
Mobile apps are different from web apps in many cases. Before we get into the details, let’s define mobile/web apps. Mobile apps are built for a specific platform, such as the IOS for Apple users or the Android for Samsung users. They only run on mobiles, and that’s how they drastically differ from web apps that run on the browser and allow users to interact with their content.
This application software myth has been around for a while now. We believe web apps and mobile apps are practical and functional in their own ways.
Mobile apps and web apps are quite different. Many choose mobile apps to build eCommerce platforms and games. But if you want to build SaaS products, client portals, marketplaces, web apps are the best way to go as users have complicated flows to navigate.
Mobile apps give more ways to interact with their product are also highly flexible. The flexibility of mobile apps is limited because of their platform-specific nature. While web apps have adjustable visuals fittable for any gadget. Additionally, they are easy to maintain, have media queries and fluid frameworks that enable them to adjust to the properties of the user’s device.
Myth #6: Web app development is costly and time-consuming
Do you know how much it costs to build a web app, and how long it takes? Let's say you want to build a marketplace similar to Airbnb. It took the Airbnb team a decade to get the web app where it stands right now. And building a similar web app might cost you $276,791 and even more.
Wait a minute, it doesn’t look like another web app development myth as these stats prove web app building is, indeed, costly and time-consuming. But, fortunately, that’s not true.
There is this phenomenon called no-code web app building. For the no-code community, the above-stated statement is one of the most widespread web app development myths.
What is no-code, you may ask? No-code is a type of software development that helps people build software without coding. It will help you shorten the time you spend on web app building and the expenses required for building a web app. To start your no-code journey, I recommend checking out Softr no-code resources and Softr itself.
Softr allows users to create code-free marketplaces, clients portals, or web apps on Airtable within just ten minutes with lego-like building blocks, dozens of features and integrations. The most time you will spend on building a web app, is learning the ins and outs of Softr or any other no-code tool. Once you pass this stage, the building process will become the easiest thing you need to do for your web app.
Myth #7: Web apps need to be built by pro web developers.
The final web app myth is the necessity to have a team of web developers build a web app. To crush down this myth once and for all, we need to move to no-code yet again.
What’s even better about no-code is the ability to build your product all by yourself without the need to hire a team of developers. In many cases, we have 1-3 people who have little or no background in coding, and they build their apps with no-code platforms effortlessly.
To keep you interested and prove my point, here are 10 web apps that were built with Softr and managed to draw traffic and conversions. If you choose to go with no-code web app building, all you got to do is have a clear direction, niche. To understand the ways to work with no-code tools, you can always reach out to their support team, find answers with FAQ. But you learn much more with Help Docs, guides and video tutorials almost every no-code tool provides to teach more about their product.
Final thoughts
Congrats! Now you know what not to believe in. Unfortunately, there are dozens of other application software myths out there. The ones we've covered in the article are some of the most crucial web app development myths that cost web app builders money, energy and time.
About Softr
Softr is an easy-to-use no-code platform that turns Airtable bases into powerful web apps, member-only websites, and client portals. Softr offers a way for you to authenticate your end-users, control access to your content and data based on conditional rules like roles, logged-in status, subscription plans, etc. If you're using Airtable as a product catalog you can use a Softr template to build your e-commerce website. Or maybe you'd like to build a custom website for your travel journal, there's a template for that too!
