Mobile apps have been making waves as profitable business tools in recent years by helping companies reach out to their target audience, create cohesive awareness and brand recognition, as well as offer convenience for users.
As the market continues to grow, we recognise a negative trend of businesses developing an app and then treating it as a passive company platform post-release. This “one and done” app treatment creates issues not only for the app’s performance but also for the company’s reputation.
This article will introduce you to mobile app maintenance, its relevancy, and how to plan for it.
What is Mobile App Maintenance?
Mobile app maintenance is the established processes a company puts in place to ensure consistency in updating the app, fixing bugs as well as keeping it active and accessible.
We view mobile app maintenance as we do house maintenance. For your house to serve its purpose and remain welcoming, you must work on maintaining its features and keeping it clean. A mobile app is the same! You want it to be simple to use, run smoothly and provide value to users and your company. To do that, you constantly need to work on it.
By creating processes, you ensure your app is welcoming and achieving goals.
The Business Significance of App Maintenance
There are many business benefits for app maintenance, but the key ones are as follows.
User experience
When you regularly maintain your app, you can keep up with users’ feedback and behaviour which can and should be used to create and/or update features to improve user satisfaction and ultimately ensure client retention. Additionally, you are able to constantly test whether your UI/UX works on the new phones in the market, such as the foldable ones.
Keeping up with updates
Technology is constantly evolving, and apps that once operated well at one point will no longer fit the newest OS versions and run slower than apps that use the latest technology. On top of that, AppStores constantly drop the lowest OS-supported apps to the bottom of the list. So, if you keep up with the changes, your app will stay caught up. For more on that, check out our White Paper about OS updates.
App security
Security threats are constantly evolving, and you must protect your clients and your company by updating your app’s security elements.
Return on investment
Continuous app maintenance helps you learn your expenses and investigate cost-efficient solutions. It can also help you avoid the risk of spending more money on a complete rebuild in the future.
App Maintenance Plan
There are different approaches to maintaining apps, from the Preventive approach, which focuses on reducing complexity and performance risks, to the Developmental approach, which focuses on avoiding long-term issues. You need to evaluate the app and its potential risks to choose the most suitable method. A great way of doing so is by conducting a mobile audit which will present a deep analysis of the application and point out focus areas.