5 Must-Have Strategies for Mobile App Maintenance

Ruchhir Agarwal
3 min readJul 7, 2016

With the rising popularity of mobile devices, a number of companies are venturing into mobile app development to create innovative apps for accomplishing varied tasks that people, these days, mostly prefer to perform through their smartphones and tablets. Developers are leaving no stone unturned to design feature rich apps and, starting from design to launch of an app, are putting in their best efforts to make their endeavors successful. However, while chalking out the budget for the development and launch of an app, executives many a time miss out certain long term costs of an app. Just creating a useful app and letting users enjoy it isn’t all about making an app successful. Developers also need to focus and invest on its maintenance which every user look forward to. Just as everything needs maintenance, be it a house or an electronic gadget, mobile apps aren’t exceptions.

Here are some strategies for the maintenance of mobile apps:

Updates

Even if you are an expert app developer, its impossible to develop a perfect app at the very first attempt. This calls for the need of update in order to make improvements. Also, the evolving technologies promote the need of incorporating newly developed features in the existing apps. Regular updates help to keep an app at par with the latest technology and also convince the users that the developers are constantly trying to provide them a better user experience. Updates can be deployed easily which makes delivering new features to the app effortless.

Improvement of Existing Features

Technologies evolve continuously and so does the features. Apart from releasing updates for new features, developers must also focus on improving the existing features. It’s good to consider feedback from users so that desirable improvements can be made. This makes the app better and more successful with time.

Testing App Upgrades

Every mobile app stores some form of data in the devices and every time an app is updated, two possible scenarios show up. In the first, the user installs the new version of the app directly without installing the previous version. This only requires proper testing of the apps and making them error free. In the second scenario, the user already uses the older version and updates the app to get the latest version. It might be the case that the new version has a changed data storage format and this requires a migration tool to migrate the data from old to new format.

Analysis and Feedback

Introducing a metrics analysis tool is important to understand how the app is performing, which feature users are appreciating and which ones are less useful. Requesting feedback from users is also a great idea as it gives a clear picture of the areas which require improvement and the new features which the users are expecting. Also, if you introduce a metrics tool in the app, inform your users about the same and provide them a way to opt-out or opt-in.

User Retention

Providing frequent and free updates is important to gain customer loyalty. Updates convey that the developers are investing enough efforts and money to improve the user experience and this helps to win the confidence of existing customers. Nurturing the mobile app is important and offering free features is a great way of retaining existing users. User retention plays a great role in making a mobile app successful and thus its important to roll out regular updates.

Mobile app maintenance is a crucial factor for the success for an app and developers must focus on it after the app launch. E2logy, a custom web application and mobile app development company, put consistent efforts for the maintenance of its mobile apps to ensure their smooth and improved functioning. A successful app is thus a fine combination of efficient development and continued maintenance.

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Ruchhir Agarwal

I’m passionate about developing software applications on mobile, web, analytics, cloud etc. This is what my company http://e2logy.com/ does.