Complete Guide on Mobile App Maintenance

Imagine you built the next big social media platform, which will probably bring a big revolution in the world. You will consider plenty of things while making the social media platform, like technology, design, security, market needs, timely maintenance of the application, and more. Streamlining all these operations will help you make the mobile application better and provide users with better service. But, building a social media platform is not only about developing and then, at last, deploying it. It is more about after the deployment phase, i.e., maintenance.

Once you have deployed the product, you will constantly need to be on your toes, understand your users’ needs, and try to make the application better with new features, maintenance, security updates, etc., and maintenance is a difficult task.

If you are wondering how to maintain your application, you are at the right place. In this article, I will walk you through complete guidance on the maintenance of an application.

Why is App Maintenance Important?

Maintaining an application has a huge impact on improving your product and the way you try to retain your customers. Learn from the largest tech companies like Google, Spotify, Apple, etc., on a timely basis they push in the security updates, change the UI/UX based on their customers’ needs, add new features, etc. These things help these large companies to provide better customer service and retain their customers. Mobile app development is not only about designing and deploying; it is an iterative process to make the application better for your users.

Benefits of Mobile App Maintenance:

Data Security:

Data security is one of the most important factors for app maintenance. You need to make sure that your users’ data is safe and encrypted. Any vulnerability in the application is more than enough to make the entire application go down. With every security update, you will also make an application stronger, which keeps the phones and applications away from malware.

User Experience:

User experience has a huge role to play when it comes to retaining customers. Application design defines whether the user stays or not. Appealing UI/UX and easy navigation help users understand and use your application effectively. From time to time, make sure to build inclusive designs and bring certain changes in the design of an application that makes it better.

Decreases Number of Uninstalls:

Have you ever downloaded any banking application, tried to use it, and then uninstalled it because you didn’t know how to use it? Or did the design sucked? This is one of the major reasons why users uninstall the application. You will have to understand your users, define features, and design it according to their needs. Appealing UI/UX and easy navigation will make your application easy to use and increase your customer base.

Cost Cutting:

Keeping a close tab on your application will help you to know your customers, the features they use the most, how you can make the application better, etc. These insights will help you to have more clarity about your users and help you to define the roadmap for further development. You can also remove the features that the users are not using and instead try something else. Researching and developing new features will also help you to increase your ROI.

Monitoring:

Monitor your application and try to understand which features your users prefer and how you can make them better. You need to solve these issues, which help you to enhance your user experience and make your application better.

Increases Scalability:

With scalability, you need to make sure that the application performs better and can manage memory efficiently. This helps you to make the application better and more scalable.

Increases Popularity:

Your application’s better performance helps you increase your application’s popularity as more people will use it. Thus the increase in popularity will help you understand your users’ needs and make the application better.

Types of Mobile App Maintenance:

Emergency Maintenance:

This type of maintenance is useful when there is a sudden problem and error which stops the system from functioning and requires immediate attention. In such scenarios, companies need to solve this issue immediately to make sure that the app is up and running.

Example: Recently, there was a major breakdown for all Google products, which led the company to do emergency maintenance so that users can continue using their products.

Perfective Maintenance:

When your target audience uses your product, they have certain requirements and need changes in the product. In perfective maintenance, you take this feedback and make your application better. Functional modifications involve source code to provide active app users with the perfect user experience which they want. Thus, making the application better for your target audience.

Adaptive Maintenance:

Adaptive maintenance helps update the system to keep it up to date by changing the hardware and software. Many times working conditions affect when and how the users can use the application.

Preventive Maintenance:

Preventive maintenance is useful when you want to decrease the occurrence of errors and work on reducing the complexity of the application. Here the major focus is to improve the understanding of the application and maintain it.

Corrective Maintenance:

Corrective maintenance helps businesses to repair their faults and residual errors in the daily app functions. Residual errors are mostly in design, logic, or coding. They are most useful from the bugs reported by users.

All of these methods are equally important when it comes to maintaining an application. Depending on the situation, you will define which maintenance method is the need of an hour. Next up, let’s see the best practices for mobile app maintenance.

Best Practices for Mobile App Maintenance:

Updating the App Regularly:

You need to send out timely updates when and where needed. It is important to keep up with the changing times of the tech world and accordingly provide users with the best and most needed features.

Monitoring the App:

You need to keep on checking the apps and their performance constantly. Keep checking things like lags, comments, the application’s responsiveness, users’ feedback, bugs, errors, etc. These things will help you know how the application performs on different devices and how users interact with it.

License Checking:

Many applications are license-based, and often it becomes difficult to keep a check on them. This is when you need to check the license of your application better constantly.

Scheduling Maintenance:

Timely maintenance of any software is important and so scheduling the application is important. Scheduling maintenance will not let you miss the important maintenance timing and make the application better to use.

Maintaining an application comes with a cost. You need to define and understand that multiple things go into defining the cost of the application. Herein, let’s see different aspects to consider while planning mobile maintenance costs.

Aspect to Consider when Planning Maintenance Costs:

Analytics:

Analytics helps you understand your users by tracking their app usage, particular features they use, features they don’t like, etc.; these things will help you make the necessary decisions. There are plenty of free tools available which you can use to understand your users. You will have a dedicated person who knows how to use these tools and can help you with the data analytics of your application. Analytics also helps you solve performance problems, glitches, crashes, bugs, etc. you will just need to troubleshoot these issues and solve them.

Hosting:

You will need to pay for the database and backend of your app, which your application hosts to perform well. There are many options available for hosting your applications, like a cloud-based environment or local database. Currently, cloud-based services are in demand as they are easy to use, accessible from anywhere, and need less investment. So, think of considering the cloud-based infrastructure.

Third-Party Apps:

When you build an application and integrate third-party applications for certain features, you will have to pay extra for it monthly or annually. So, you need to consider this as well when maintaining your application.

Bug Updates:

Who would think bug fixes would cost you something? But, yes, they do. You need to update applications from time to time and fix a bug when and where needed. These bug fixes can cost a certain amount depending on the lines of code you write and the app size and features you are trying to incorporate.

Marketing:

Marketing your application is essential to grow your business and reach more customers. You will need to understand market needs and accordingly decide your marketing plan. You will need to market your application via different techniques like digital marketing, influencer marketing, etc. these things will help you to stand ahead of the competition, increase your reach, and grow your client base. These things help businesses to make the necessary decisions and make better products.

Client Support:

Hire a team for dedicated client support who helps your customers, provides them with the perfect solution and gives solutions to their technical problems. 24/7 hours support will provide your users with timely support and better service. Having dedicated client support will let you provide a personalized experience to your customers. As a result, this will help you to increase your customer base and make the application better.

App Security:

App security is an essential part of any application. You will need to focus on two major parts: legally imposed changes and ongoing security optimization. You need to ensure that you do not put any sensitive user’s data in danger; you will also need to track all privacy updates or carry out changes in third-party integrations. Another important thing you need to remember is to abide by the data security laws of different countries as well.

Consider these different factors while defining the cost of app maintenance. Next up, let’s see how you can decrease the development costs.

Decrease Mobile App Development Costs:

Choose Correct App Development Platform:

There are two ways you can develop an application: Native and Hybrid app development. In native app development, you code dedicatedly for different platforms like iOS and Android. This will allow the app to perform quicker and lighter. It also depends on the services, performance, and features of your application. But, the drawback is that you will need to maintain two apps for two different operating systems and have dedicated developers for each platform.

Whereas hybrid applications use a single code-base to develop applications. You don’t need to invest in dedicated developers, code twice, or maintain two different applications. You can handle everything easily with the help of a single code-base, and the app performs effectively.

Be Selective for Features:

When defining the application features, you need to be selective. Users will not select all the features you provide them, so you will have to understand their needs and then curate features accordingly. Carry out user research and know your customers’ needs, problems they are facing with your application, and how you can make it better, or add new features to make it easier for them to use the application.

Maintenance Strategy:

Have a dedicated team who helps you to maintain your application. You need to define ways to maintain your application and ways which work better for your users. Follow all the maintenance methods and make the application easy and fun to use for your users.

Dedicated Team:

For mobile app development, you will need to hire a dedicated team of developers who can manage different development verticals like designing, developing, testing, marketing, maintenance, etc. For this, you will need to invest and make sure that the team is on the same page and working efficiently to deliver the application on time.

Conclusion:

Maintaining an application is as important as other verticals of the development phase because you are constantly trying to make your application better. Don’t think of developing an application if you cannot maintain it.

If you are thinking of developing an application, you can reach an ecommerce app development company like us. We have experts who can help you with each phase of app development. Reach out to us, and we will be happy to help you.