Mobile App Maintenance: The Best Practices

Mobile apps have transformed how people shop for products and services. The apps are an innovation that has presented tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Statistics show that the number of smartphone users will increase to 4 billion by 2023 worldwide.

It means that the demand for professional mobile app developers and mobile app maintenance services providers will grow further.

There is more than just the clean code that usually grabs all the attention when it comes to apps. There is a great deal of innovation and technological advancement behind the scene.

If you have a mobile app, it is not good to keep it as it is, as it calls for maintenance. It is necessary for you to monitor the performance of your app and upgrade it as per requirements.

If your app becomes obsolete, it poses a problem as there arises the prospect of Google removing your app from the Google Play Store. In 2019, Google removed nearly 700,000 outdated apps from the Play Store.

While launching new mobile apps is on the rise, removing obsolete apps from the Google Play Store is also posing a concern for app owners.

What is the reason behind apps getting obsolete, leading to their removal from the Play Store? The reason is improper maintenance.

Why Should You Maintain and Update Your Mobile App?

Owning an app comes with the responsibility of updating and maintaining it. You should not fall behind in incurring the app maintenance cost to maintain your app to prevent it from becoming outdated.

In addition to keeping your app up-to-date, the maintenance will also entail the following benefits:

– Timely Updates

When you run an app, you should keep yourself abreast of the users’ tastes and preferences. The app features must conform to what users want.

There are many instances of smartphone users uninstalling apps just because the logo did not look good. It shows that users do not compromise even with small features, functionalities, look, or feelings.

If they see something that is not within their expectations, they do not even think twice before uninstalling an app.

So, it underscores the need to continuously monitor users’ expectations and preferences and update your app as per market requirements.

There are standard guidelines to follow while storing your app in Google Play Store. If you violate the guidelines, your app might face rejection from the store.

If there is a downfall in your app ranking, the Play Store may delete the app in a cleanup drive. Therefore, you must update your app with the latest features and APIs.

– Better User Experiences

You cannot escape from providing a better user experience for the success of your app. With a good user experience, you will improve user retention, increase customer loyalty, develop long-term relationships with users, and get more traffic, and more conversions apart from getting positive reviews.

– Higher ROI

Updating your app will enable you to reap financial benefits, such as a higher return on investment(ROI). You will get new cost-cutting benefits and get more users.

– Reducing Downtimes

Downtimes can hamper your revenues. Maintenance will enable you to reduce downtimes. As such, your revenue and app usage will remain unimpacted.

– Security Against Cyber Attacks

With the growth of mobile apps, the risk of cyber attacks also has grown. Professional mobile app development involves following standard practices to make the app fully secure to protect it against data thefts.

Hackers are on the lookout for stealing data from apps continuously. They formulate new and innovative ways to steal confidential data from apps.

So, you can protect your app against theft by continuously updating your app with the latest security protocols.

Types of Mobile App Maintenance

After you have come to know about the benefits of mobile app maintenance, you should know the types, which are as follows:

– Emergency

When you have to provide an immediate solution to prevent your users from undergoing any bad experiences, emergency maintenance is a case to point.

There can be sudden, unpredictable and unexpected issues with your app. Such problems call for immediate maintenance action to provide users with a seamless experience and keep the app running smoothly.

– Perfective

You can know the changing user behavior and requirements with the latest app features and functionalities.

With those, you can get user feedback and update the source code accordingly to offer your users a perfect experience.

– Adaptive

Adaptive maintenance involves implementing the necessary features in the app to keep it up to the trend. There can be some app adjustments to make in the operating system or software environment to make it operate impactfully.

– Preventive

Preventive maintenance is the prevention or elimination of the occurrence of errors. It involves code restructuring, code optimization, and documentation updating to reduce application complexity and improve maintainability.

– Corrective

Corrective maintenance involves fixing bugs and defects in the app. It also consists of fixing errors related to logic, design, and coding.

App Maintenance Cost

Once the mobile app development life cycle gets over, and you publish the Play Store app, the maintenance phase begins. And it entails a cost.

You can also delegate the task of maintaining your app to a mobile app development company.

Usually, app maintenance costs are higher in the first year and go down in the succeeding years. For the first year, the maintenance costs can go up to 50 percent of the total development cost. After that, the cost can decrease by 15-25 percent every successive year.

The cost depends on the operating system type and the app. iOS and Android apps differ in their maintenance costs.

Best App Maintenance Practices

For maintaining your app efficiently and provide a seamless experience to users, you must follow a set of best practices, which are as follows:

– Adding New Updates

Constantly monitor the improvement areas to implement new features in your app as per user requirements.

– Updating User Interface (UI)

Keep your app updated with a unique user interface. Take into account the market trends and users’ preferences during the update. Bear in mind that the UI has a lot to do with the success of your app.

– Monitoring Performance

For the smooth functioning of your app, its performance is the key. So, do not fail to monitor its performance regularly. If you find any responsiveness issues or bugs, fix them at once without any delay.

Ensure that your app is free of issues, like slow loading speed and less responsiveness, which may affect the app’s performance. It can lead to lessening user engagement.

Conclusion:

Mobile apps exist in a competitive arena, so you should keep your app up-to-date to sustain the competition. You can also seek advice from a mobile apps company about the best app maintenance and thereafter best app marketing practices.

It is necessary to maintain a mobile app to give users a great experience. If you fail to maintain your app, you might see an erosion of your user base and revenue loss. It can also lead to zero installation of your app.

Also, the users save their personal and financial information in the mobile apps; hence these apps are likely to be bombarded by hackers. Hence, if you keep your app updated, it will help you to maintain the security of the app and face the attacks in a stronger way. 

In order to keep your mobile app at the top of its category, you must understand that your mobile app maintenance is very crucial and of the utmost importance. If you know that your mobile app is an ongoing progressing product, you must invest in app maintenance at the earliest.