Mobile App Maintenance and Support Services – Everything You Need To Know About

Mobile apps have transformed the whole tech world, and the way people shop for their required services and products has completely changed now. Therefore, with the ever-increasing number of mobile phones, businesses have switched their focus on developing mobile apps to connect to their customers directly. 

As we all know, Colossal effort and innovation are needed for building mobile applications. But, is your mobile app development project completed by launching it in the app stores? No, it doesn’t! A robust mobile app needs proper maintenance and support services. Therefore, apart from focusing on the features of your app and ensuring it to be unique in the right way, you also need to ensure you provide adequate mobile app maintenance and support to the users. 

Additionally, because of the ever-growing fear of malware and cyber threats, it is essential to have a team constantly monitoring your mobile app. Another benefit of hiring a mobile app maintenance company is that the mobile app is consistently scanned for bugs left unnoticed during pre-launch testing. 

According to a recent report, the number of outdated apps removed by Google from the Play Store was almost 700,000 in 2019. So what can be the reason for eliminating apps with such a huge count? This is improper support and maintenance of mobile applications. If you don’t want to lose out on your users, then you need to ensure that your app provides a seamless app experience all the time. So let us put some light on the significance of mobile app maintenance and support. 

What Is Mobile App Maintenance And Support?

Mobile app and maintenance support is the process that ensures a mobile application is working fine without any bugs or flaws. It includes extensive monitoring, fixing, and updating features of the application. You can consider your app successful when you have an adequate number of active users. The objective here is to offer the best application experience to the users.

Importance Of Having Mobile App Maintenance And Support Services

Global statistics suggest that over 50% of apps lose most of their customers within the first couple of months of launch. The feedback data indicates that this could be because of the poor application maintenance and support services quality.

No matter how good a product is, you always have ways to progress it. Hence, you need to be advanced with modern technology and features to keep users’ attention. By 2021, you can expect smartphone users to grow to 3.8 billion, which leads to the high demand for professional mobile app developers and mobile app maintenance and support services providers.

Let’s dig deep into a few aspects that explain application maintenance and support’s importance.

Release Timely Updates And Decrease Uninstalls

It’s essential to offer features and functionalities that reach their expectations. For example, in 2017, over 20% of smartphone users uninstalled applications only because of the inadequate logo appearance on the mobile device. It means that users do not want to compromise with anything, whether its features, functionality, look, or feel. So, the bottom line is that you need to continually monitor user expectations and preferences—and release updates of your app as per market demands.

Even the app stores ask to follow standard guidelines, and if your application is not following the required policies, your listing may get rejected. If you find a downfall in your app ranking, you need to update your app with the latest features and APIs.

Delivering Better User Experiences

There is no shortcut for the growth and success of your mobile application. But, first, you need to deliver better user experiences (UX).

A fantastic user experience helps you:

• • Progress user retention
  • Enhance customer loyalty
  • Develop long standing relationships with users
  • Get positive feedback and reviews
  • Improved traffic
  • More chances of conversions

With such benefits, it’s worth investing to make your app more interactive and deliver a unique user experience.

Enhanced ROI in the Long Run

When you timely update your application, you will get huge benefits in the financial aspects, such as boosting ROI. It also takes along new ways of cost-cutting and earns new users simultaneously. So how can regular application support and maintenance help? It’s pretty simple! When working on occasional bug fixes, you can optimize the cost of bug fixes over a more extended period.

Restricting Downtimes and Revenue Losses

Any downtime could cause considerable revenue losses. Many popular brands like Amazon Web Services, Bank of America Online Banking, Blackberry, etc., have experienced major revenue losses because of downtime. Timely updates will save you from unexpected revenue growth and customer usage downfall.

Securing Your Mobile App from Cyber Attacks

The evolution of mobile apps is also growing the quest for cybersecurity. Professional mobile app developers follow the standard practice for mobile app security, keeping it away from data theft. However, when data hackers continuously search for innovative approaches and find new ways to steal your confidential and financial information, you can constantly look into app maintenance and update apps with the latest security protocols.

It is vital to have mobile app maintenance and support services to avoid bad user experiences and any additional cost that you need to invest in. If you’re not investing in mobile app maintenance, it could be the most significant breakdown in your revenue growth and result in zero installation of your app.

Management Of Downtimes

Regardless of how big or small it is, every mobile application faces downtimes at some point. Mobile application maintenance and support services ensure these downtimes are detected in advance and are taken care of before they can start making an impact. The application maintenance support also helps you find solutions in these situations and allow the app to function naturally.

Sync With Library Updates

When your app is synced with software libraries, it helps make changes or updates. Additionally, these libraries have multiple code lines that developers should use rather than writing code from scratch, thus improving application optimization. Mobile app maintenance and support services play a significant role in this regard.

Keep reading: Mobile App Performance Optimization Tips

Different Types Of Mobile App Maintenance:

There are a range of opportunities requiring mobile app maintenance and support services. However, controlling all these possibilities simultaneously and satisfying users is challenging. As a result, application maintenance and support services are classified as follows

Emergency Maintenance

An unexpected or emergency situation could disclose the nature of the problems—the issues or errors would be unpredictable, sudden, and spontaneous. Therefore, to deal with such mishappenings, you need to provide an instant solution to the end-user to avoid any hassle and give a unified experience.

Perfective Maintenance

Perfective maintenance ensures that the user gets a picture-perfect experience of the application, including evaluating customer feedback and adopting changes based on user needs. It focuses on the delivery of the type of experience of customer desire. Therefore, it would make sense to positively accept users’ feedback and take the proper precaution of function updates in the source code, providing a flawless user experience.

Adaptive Maintenance

This is the procedure of employing modifications in an application system part. When the system is updated and certain things change, adaptive maintenance ensures that this part of the system aligns with the changing environment. 

It may be necessary to make changes to a working environment such as hardware, operating system, or software environment that could affect the operation of the application. This increases the overall performance of the application and its operation.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance focuses on eliminating all errors/bugs from the system. It also monitors the risks of mistakes and actively avoids them. In addition, it works on the application complexity to make it accessible. The goal is to reduce application complexity and improve maintenance through code restructuring, code optimization, and documentation update.

Corrective Maintenance

Customers regularly report various types of problems while using the application. With corrective maintenance, you can pay attention to the application functions’ modifications, bugs, and defects. The maintenance and support services include application logic, design, and coding errors.

The maintenance of mobile applications is one of the crucial stages of the entire mobile application development process. That is why entrepreneurs are recommended to set estimations for mobile app maintenance and support services. But now, the main question that arises is how much will it cost to maintain an app?

How Much Does App Maintenance Cost?

Maintenance and support start after completing the life cycle of mobile application development and publish it on the Play Store. Application maintenance support usually requires additional costs. The app maintenance costs can be significantly higher during the first year, up to 50% of the total development cost, and decrease to 15-25% for each year after that. 

It includes the operating system type, backend development, and mobile App development cost. If your app is iOS or Android-based, its maintenance cost will vary accordingly. For timely updates and maintenance, you can hire an Android app development company or an iOS app development company for the type of mobile app you own.

Here are some other things to consider when considering the cost of maintaining the application:

Hosting

The cost of server setup for developing a mobile application and app hosting take significant participation is app maintenance cost. Therefore, you should focus on the type of server required for your application and estimate the cost of hosting the applicable application.

Depending on the type of data, you can select the server resource. For example, it would be better to know if the application data is static or textual or processes data transactions in audio and video form. The price of an application hosting server can vary anywhere, depending on your choice. It depends on certain factors like content, the number of active users, and expected growth.

Analytics

Crashes, errors, and other issues with the Analytics mobile apps should be monitored and analyzed frequently. Tools like Google Analytics are needed to get real-time data insight. You can actively check out your users’ expectations and behavior so that you can make prompt decisions and provide the appropriate content. You will find various free tools, but some advanced tools help you find real-time data. The monitoring and decision-making also involve a cost in time, and you must choose a mobile app maintenance company that matches your business model.

Bug Fixing and Updates

Regular updates can help promptly fix the bugs and issues in the app and enhance the user experience. Numerous apps are available with their recent updates that make it more usable. However, the cost of upgrades varies and depends on several factors.

Third-Party

While building your application, you may pay for a license. So any extra feature that you implement in your app with the help of an outsider takes additional investment. It would help if you considered calculating these third-party costs.

Customer Support

If users have any issues, it would be a brilliant approach to voice their concerns and instantly solve their problems. You may consider some investment in customer support that will add more value to your app and provide a user-friendly experience. The more feature-rich your application, the more you need to invest accordingly.

The cost for mobile app maintenance depends on some core factors like features, functionalities, look, and feel. If you want to grab maximum user’s attention, it is strongly recommended to follow strict industry guidelines to meet the market demands.

Conclusion

Mobile app maintenance and support is not a task of one-time effort. In this competitive era where everyone is coming up with something new every day, you need to focus on the latest market trends and demands and update your app accordingly. In addition, once you launch your app, it requires a lot of consideration and should be kept under guidance.

Thus, enthusiastic and dedicated mobile app development professionals from mobile app maintenance companies should frequently monitor the business app. A reputed Mobile App maintenance Company can help you update your app as per your business model and requirements.