Mobile App Maintenance – Everything You Need to Know

Without mobile app maintenance, your app is on its way out the door.

And that’s not just because all major app stores give obsolete apps the boot. Your retention rates also depend on your ability to improve the product you want users to come back to.

So, if you’re wondering whether you really need to maintain your app, the following lines are for you.

What Is Mobile App Maintenance?

Mobile application maintenance is the ongoing process of updating your app, improving functionality, and ironing out issues after launch. Continuing throughout your app’s lifespan, it’s the last phase of the mobile app development lifecycle.

Through user feedback and analytics, you can shape updates around user needs, behavior, and expectations. This helps you create the perfect app experience for your users and a more appealing product.

Types of Mobile App Maintenance

There isn’t just one catch-all maintenance process. So, you should know what mobile app maintenance services your app needs. There are five types of maintenance services you can choose from –

1. Preventive Maintenance – This type of maintenance is focused on regular testing to root out bugs and errors. As the name implies, it’s designed to future-proof your app by preventing deterioration over time.
2. Adaptive Maintenance – An app that can’t adapt to new software and hardware will be obsolete in no time. Adaptive maintenance keeps your app up to date and compatible with all mobile devices.
3. Corrective Maintenance – This routine maintenance targets known errors that could otherwise cause downtime.
4. Predictive Maintenance – This type of maintenance entails using data analysis, machine learning (ML), and real-time monitoring to predict potential issues before they cause downtime or affect performance. It minimizes time wasted searching for hypothetical bugs.
5. Emergency Maintenance – Every now and then, you’ll be hit by the unexpected. It could be unscheduled downtime, a security breach, or a crash bug. These issues must be dealt with immediately, and that’s what emergency maintenance is for.

Why Mobile Application Maintenance Is Important

If you don’t want your app falling behind the competition or breaking entirely, you need a mobile app maintenance plan.

Research by Upland has revealed that 21% of users launch an app just once and then never use it again. This just goes to show that first impressions matter. An app that looks abandoned by its developers will be abandoned by its users. Cue low ratings and eventual removal from the app store.

Here’s how app maintenance avoids that.

Enhancing User Experience

Users download apps for their features, but they stay for the user experience. Mobile app maintenance is how you create the experience they expect, using feedback and analytics to improve your product.

A steady maintenance schedule allows you to address issues and concerns and keep your app running smoothly. But it’s also an opportunity improve the existing design and user journey, boosting engagement and reducing churn.

Adapting to Tech Changes

Technology evolves fast, and that means your app is at a constant risk of incompatibility with new hardware and operating systems.

For a seamless, disruption-free experience, an app needs to function normally across all mobile devices. That can be accomplished with regular adaptive maintenance to sync your app with the current tech landscape.

Boosting Performance and Quality

Apps are made up of many moving parts. The more complex the app, the more parts it has, and the more things can go wrong.

So, it’s unrealistic to assume you’ve rooted out all bugs and cranked the performance as high as it will go. Even after rigorous testing, errors and inefficiencies will pop up. Heavy user load may even reveal previously hidden issues with your app’s speed and performance.

Mobile app maintenance and support services ensure the quality of your app only gets better with time.

Upgrading App Design

Users are constantly moving onto newer and better apps. Which is why app retention rates, according to Statista, fall to an average of 5.7% thirty days from install.

To have an edge against your competition, you need to be attuned to the market, the tech, and your users. Updating your interface to modern, efficient designs will reduce friction in the user journey and improve conversion.

Improving Security

Security issues are a top concern for both app developers and users. Failure to attend to them can result in catastrophic theft or exploitation of data.

Even minor threats and user feedback are likely to expose the vulnerabilities lurking in your app’s security. So, regular maintenance is necessary to patch up those holes before they let in anything truly serious.

What to Focus On During App Maintenance

Before you assign or outsource your mobile app maintenance to the right team, you should have a plan of action. Your team will need it so they can tailor the maintenance cycles to your app’s needs.

The following checklist covers all the essentials of maintenance that you won’t want to skip.

1) Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) is the process of tracking and analyzing your app’s performance using software tools.

APM makes it much easier to spot issues that impact the user experience. Not only that, but it also helps you monitor how well your app is performing in a business sense. Retention, conversion, session lengths, and downloads are all vital metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t.

2) Bug Fixes

Bugs are the bane of any software. Imperfect code introduces errors or flaws that result in unintended app behavior. This behavior may be as minor as a graphical glitch or as app-breaking as a hard crash.

New bugs are bound to pop up after every update you make – and they add up, too.

The last thing you or your users want is a buggy mess that just barely limps along. So, regular quality assurance (QA) testing is an investment any app developer must take seriously, even post launch.

3) Fresh Content

The market is competitive, and its demands are always changing. As a result, stale content is a one-way ticket to low user retention and engagement. Not to mention, app stores push apps that come out with regular fresh content.

These two factors are proof enough of why you should include content updates in your mobile app maintenance strategy. Besides, adding more value to your app never hurts.

4) UI/UX Design Improvements

The user interface (UI) defines the navigation and interactions in your app. Naturally, app users look for intuitive, accessible, and stylistically appealing design in any app, regardless of utility.

As for user experience (UX), this focuses on the entire journey from launch to exit and how it makes users feel. UX also encompasses your app’s tools and features, including emerging tech such as –

• Augmented reality (AR)
• Virtual reality (VR)
• Artificial intelligence (AI)

It’s a good idea to update your UI/UX design every once in a while, especially for quality-of-life tweaks.

5) Security Updates

If your app’s security is several steps behind, you may very well be a cybercriminal’s next victim.

Security updates patch out vulnerabilities that hackers may exploit to access users’ data or systems. You can also add extra layers of protection through multifactor or biometric authentication.

6) Operating System Compatibility

Mobile phone operating systems like Android, iOS, and Windows receive regular, automatic patches and yearly version upgrades.

Patches are usually focused on security enhancements and bug fixes. But even these minor OS updates may have unexpected consequences for your app’s functionality.

It’s therefore ideal to roll out your app security updates alongside OS updates. You can cover compatibility and take advantage of better OS security all at once.

Do You Wish to Update Your Existing Apps?

DPL’s custom mobile development team has been in the business of mobile app maintenance for decades. Our strategy of reflexiveness, rigorous testing, and careful attention to users’ needs makes us the perfect choice for user-centric maintenance.

If you’re ready to polish your app to a mirror finish, fill out the form below. Let us know how we can help.