After buying a car, do you change the oil? Do you rotate the tires? Maintaining apps is similar to maintaining cars. Once you have it, it should be regularly updated to create a smoother, more enjoyable experience.
Prioritizing application maintenance:
Did you know that 78% of users uninstall an app within 90 days of downloading it? There are many reasons users would uninstall an app, whether it’s because they didn’t find the app helpful or engaging or because bugs are causing it to crash when they open it.
Here are a few ways to reduce the number of uninstalls:
Adding new features can increase user longevity, making it a long-term, useful platform for them. Adding new features keeps users interested because of fresh interactive opportunities for them to engage with. Identify which parts of your app are useful by listening to your market. Unsatisfied users will give your app reviews in the App Store or Google Play Store, telling you if they are unhappy and potentially suggesting what can be done to create a long-term user out of them.
Also, adding minor feature updates is more effective for your app maintenance cost than building an entirely new model or updating the original model after a long time. If you stall on ongoing application updates, maintenance will be more time-consuming due to the multitude of issues that can occur. This could result in work downtime due to relearning the platform.
Monitoring app performance will allow you to keep an eye on loading times, lags, and responsiveness. Stay up to date with analytics reports to see what users are engaging with most and least. Monitoring these metrics minimizes the loss of users and keeps the app in its best condition for the long term.
Positive user interaction and user experience (UI/UX) keep your app up and running. Monitoring your app periodically over time gives you crucial insight into how your users feel about their experience. Identifying customer feedback and market trends helps you stay in the loop with changing user preferences, problems, and habits. Updating your application maintenance services enables you to deliver better user experiences and build stronger relationships between you and your customers, ultimately developing deeper loyalty and trust.
Technology is constantly changing and updating, which means your app should be as well. Each year, a new iOS or Android update comes out, resulting in a need for app updates.
If your app isn’t maintained regularly or isn’t compatible with all the latest devices and mobile updates, your users will no longer be able to use it. As technology progresses, your users will move on to different apps, leaving yours in the dust.
A well-maintained app can bring financial benefits, such as increased ROI and decreased costs.
Perfect application development is impossible and will often result in necessary bug fixes once the app is live. However, keeping up to date on your app maintenance will spread the costs of fixing bugs over an extended period and allow you to put those company resources toward other financial wants or needs.
The longer you go without mobile app maintenance, you may end up coming face-to-face with a costly technical issue that could have been prevented if you had noticed the problem sooner.
You can also save company resources by monitoring how users are engaging with the app. If you monitor performance and notice a feature on the app that users aren’t engaging with, you can eliminate that feature and put those extra funds toward a more valued feature.
While there are fundamentals of mobile application development, there are also fundamentals of mobile application maintenance. Your application should constantly be growing to accommodate every new app or service that comes out. Updates are necessary for your applications to stay current, and sometimes one of your apps will need to be replaced with a new, retooled version.
At Tridius, we specialize in application development and management to help you find the perfect process for your mobile app. We’ll also outline the steps you need to take to get your app off the ground. Let’s create a system that works.
Tridius Technologies (a Terralogic Company) is an IT consulting firm that blends strategic planning with technology innovation, in areas like Cloud Infrastructure, Application Development,
Managed Services and Dynamics 365. Our mission is to inspire, innovate and improve.
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