What is App Maintenance? Why Should You Focus On It?

What is Mobile App Maintenance?

Building an app is an extensive process that goes through many phases, starting with the inception of an idea and ending with app maintenance, which is the longest part of the mobile app development process. It kicks in as soon as the app is launched or even after coding.

Mobile app maintenance is an important part of the software development process that is also its biggest phase. It starts as soon as the app is complete and published.

In the software development life cycle, maintenance is the last phase, may it be the traditional waterfall model or the modern approach of DevOps. However, it is the biggest phase out of all the phases of SDLC.

Importance of Maintaining an App

Some mobile app developers overlook app maintenance, which can make the app go obsolete, non-functional, and irrelevant. Furthermore, no user prefers an app that hasn’t been updated since its release. The more time the app hasn’t been updated the more chances are of it going out of business.

Moreover, different app stores have the same requirement of adding an updated app to the platform. Failing to do so might result in the removal of the app from the platform altogether.

Maintaining an app properly not only increases the customer base but also helps to find better ways to monetise your app. One major reason to prioritise app maintenance is to prevent it from becoming obsolete. Other main reasons are:

1.Reduce the Number of Uninstalls

Active users are the most important asset for any app owner, and retaining them is the top priority. Nobody wants to use an app that is outdated. Apps plagued by frequent crashes and irritable bugs repel users. The last resort for a user, in such a case, is to uninstall the app and look for an alternative, which is something that the app developer doesn’t want.

App maintenance not only corrects the defects present in a mobile app but also adds enhancements, brings new functionalities and solves emerging problems. All of these help to increase the app’s retention rate.

2.Deliver a Better User Experience

Downloading the app doesn’t ensure that the user will like your app, delivering the best user experience will. The success and growth of your app requires long-term relationships with users and for that, you need to ensure providing a unique and compelling app experience.

One tip to enhance user experience is to closely monitor the app over time to understand how users like the look and feel of your app. You can leverage a survey to gain more insights into the same.

Keeping track of market trends also helps you to make adjustments to your app in accordance with evolving customer preferences. Users happy with your app not only stay longer on the app but also leave positive feedback and spread the word about it.

3.Stay Ahead of the Competition

Today, there are more than 5 million apps available for different mobile platforms, including Play Store and App Store. Obviously, not every app is equal and neither receives the same level of success. The competition is fierce, and the quality is of the utmost importance.

One way to stay ahead of the competition via your mobile app is to capitalise on the latest trends that users are going ga ga over. Football World Cup upcoming? Add a feature to your app that serves more about the event to the user, like news and updates.

Another way is to closely monitor your competitors and then detect their pain points. You can update your app – which is a part to maintain an app – to add relevant features based on your findings.

To outlast the neck-to-neck competition from your rivals, you need to maintain and scale the app continuously. Users start looking for alternatives when they find an app broken, non-functional, or inoperational.

4.Safety from Cyber Attacks

The internet has become bigger, but so does the world of cybercrime. Cyberattacks have become a common phenomenon and its frequency is increasing by the day. In such times, the need for data security and cybersecurity is not disposable.

As most modern mobile apps are webapps and deal with the web in one or the other way, ensuring their safety is of utmost importance. Regular security updates help you to safeguard your mobile app against such threats and also fix potential security issues.

5.Increase ROI

Return on investment is an important factor for businesses. The more it is, the better the business model. A regularly updated app helps in maximising ROI in the long term by decreasing the cost to acquire new users.

Monitoring your app closely helps to find bugs and fix them immediately rather than fixing them later, which costs more. Furthermore, you can remove underutilised features and replace them with better ones for enhanced user engagement.

Types of App Maintenance

As mentioned before, to stay ahead of your competition, you must focus on the continuous improvement of your mobile application, and for doing so you need to maintain the app.

An experienced mobile app development company will help you with maintaining the app by offering a wide range of app maintenance services that will help you to add new features, improve existing features, and so on.

There are several forms of app maintenance to deal with different types of requirements. These range from corrective maintenance to preventive maintenance. Let’s know about them, one at a time:

1.Adaptive Maintenance

In this type of app maintenance, the application is constantly tracked for changes to keep it up-to-date. An application’s environment can be changed by many factors, such as hardware, software, and security threats. Thus, apps that don’t receive adaptive maintenance become outdated quickly.

2.Corrective Maintenance

This form of app maintenance pertains to dealing with the defects and issues in an app. The main idea here is to correct an incorrect aspect of the app.

Corrective maintenance issues usually relate to errors pertaining to application logic, coding, and design.

3.Emergency Maintenance

There are times when an issue or error comes out of the blues. Moreover, its intensity or importance is such that it requires immediate attention. This is when emergency maintenance is applied. To ensure a smooth user experience, you need to fix the issues on an immediate basis.

4.Perfective Maintenance

This form of app maintenance tries to meet the ever-changing user requirements. As such, it takes user feedback into consideration and ensures delivering an awesome user experience by taking care of functional modifications in the source code.

5.Preventive Maintenance

This type of app maintenance prevents errors and defects to occur in the application by taking preemptive measures. The focus here is to reduce app complexity while improving app maintainability by code restructuring, code optimisation, and updating the documents.

How Much Does Maintaining an App Cost?

There are several factors that contribute to the overall cost of maintaining an app. Moreover, it is something that costs more initially but reduces over the years.

On average, the cost to maintain an app over the first year of its release can be as much as 40 to 50% of the cost to develop the app. In subsequent years, the app maintenance cost can be 15% or less.

You can connect with an expert mobile app development company to get an accurate estimate of app maintenance costs. The most important factors that determine this cost are:

• Intensity and quantity of bugs and issues
• Web hosting prices and server costs
• Customer support
• Leveraging third-party services
• Scope of app marketing
• Development team location

Conclusion

Most businesses overlook the concept of maintaining an app, which can yield several undesirable results initially, and ultimately, failure. Therefore, the success of an app depends on how well it is maintained.

Apptunix is not only dedicated to building industry-leading, robust, and secure apps but also to ensuring that they are up-to-date, resilient, and evolving to meet user requirements. We can help you with not only maintaining your app but also building it and marketing it.