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Complete guide on mobile app maintenance
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
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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.
7. 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.
8. 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
9. 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:
10. 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:
11. 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
12. 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.
13. 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:
14. 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.
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