Mobile applications have revolutionized multiple aspects of our lives: how we communicate, shop, work, and interact with the world.
Witnessing the rising count of smartphone users, start-ups and large-scale businesses are investing in mobile app development. It helps them spread brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, earn customer loyalty, and target a wider audience.
However, the impact of mobile applications on a business can be negative if a user constantly faces issues while using the application. Here, the mobile app development process needs to be more precise and mobile app maintenance must be more focused.
- Why Mobile App Maintenance Is Important
- What are the Types of Mobile App Maintenance?
- What Steps Included in Mobile App Maintenance?
- What Is the Cost of Mobile App Maintenance?
- Factors that Decide Mobile App Maintenance Cost
- How to Reduce Mobile App Maintenance Cost?
- How Does Octal IT Solution Help in Mobile App Maintenance?
- Summing Up
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
The mobile app development process is wider than designing, developing, and deploying the application. Mobile app maintenance is the final and most crucial step of the app development cycle.
Mobile app maintenance services include upgrading the application according to industry standards, adding new features, fixing bugs and glitches, etc. In this article, we will cover the mobile app maintenance guide that includes importance, procedure, cost, and types of app maintenance services.
Why Mobile App Maintenance Is Important
Let’s begin with understanding why one should invest in mobile app maintenance services and its importance. To maintain your mobile app development cost you will need to Hire Dedicated Mobile App Developers.
Fixing Bugs, Glitches, and Errors
The first and foremost reason to avail of mobile app maintenance services is to fix bugs and errors faced by users. Regular maintenance enables the developers to find and fix errors promptly and ensure a seamless user experience.
Compatibility
As the OS (Operating Systems) of smart devices are constantly evolving, app compatibility might become an issue in the future. Consistent maintenance and support service ensures that the application stays compatible with the latest devices.
Security Upgradation
Mobile applications accommodate the sensitive data related to users. Maintenance and support services include security upgrades that help avoid evolving security threats and maintain user trust.
Optimizing Performance
The performance of a mobile application might degrade with time due to data accumulation or inefficiency of code. Mobile app maintenance services include tuning the performance of the application.
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Adding New Features
Market trends and user preferences usually change over time. Mobile app maintenance and support service allows integrations of new features that meet the user’s expectations.
User Feedback Integration
The feedback of customers is quite valuable and is the key to a successful business. Mobile app maintenance services include listening to the user’s opinions and making necessary changes that drive business growth.
Extended Lifespan
The applications getting constant support and maintenance services have a longer lifespan when compared to others. Mobile app maintenance services help ensure smooth application functionality and deliver a robust user experience.
It saves Time and Cost
Proactive mobile app maintenance service enables developers to identify and fix issues as they appear before it becomes major issue. It helps save time, effort, and resources in the long run.
Compliance and Regulations
The rules and regulations related to a business might change. Regular mobile application maintenance services also include complying with the latest privacy laws and industry regulations, minimizing the risk of legal concerns.
Business Continuity
Mobile applications have slowly and gradually become an essential part of the business as they enable targeting a wider audience and boost sales.
Refraining maintenance and support services for mobile applications might become a reason behind security vulnerabilities and user dissatisfaction in this rapidly evolving app market.
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What are the Types of Mobile App Maintenance?
Moving forward in our mobile app maintenance guide, we will now cover maintenance types. We have categorized mobile app maintenance into different categories as follows –
Corrective Maintenance
Starting with corrective maintenance includes finding and addressing bugs and glitches the users encounter. It is considered one of the mobile app maintenance best practices as it is carried out to ensure delivering a robust and seamless experience to the users.
Adaptive Maintenance
It is further divided into two, i.e., compatibility updates and localization updates
- The compatibility update includes updating the application according to the latest operating systems of smart devices.
- Localization updates encompass the process of tailoring the application’s content and customer support to align with user preferences.
Perfective Maintenance
Under this maintenance and support service stage, the old features are optimized, and new features are added to the mobile application to meet the user’s changing preferences.
Preventive Maintenance
Like adaptive maintenance, it is further divided into i.e. security updates and performance optimization.
- Security patches are implemented, and best security practices are carried out to eliminate security threats.
- The application’s performance is constantly monitored and optimized; it helps ensure that the application runs smoothly.
Emergency Maintenance
It is carried out to fix the issues that need urgent attention to avoid severe disruptions. This sort of mobile application service is typically unexpected.
Routine Maintenance
This includes addressing minor issues, planning updates, improving app performance, ensuring app compatibility, server maintenance, and data back-ups.
Data Management Maintenance
This maintenance program is basically for data-driven applications. It involves database optimization, data clean-up, data integrity, etc.
User Feedback-Based Maintenance
App user feedback, in the form of reviews, ratings, and suggestions, undergoes thorough analysis, leading to application user-focused enhancements.
Scalability Maintenance
The server infrastructure of the mobile applications is optimized to handle higher loads as the count of users increases.
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What Steps Included in Mobile App Maintenance?
The mobile app maintenance includes numerous steps. We have covered the entire mobile app maintenance process in five steps.
Audit and Monitor App Performance
Monitoring and analyzing the mobile application’s performance is the first and foremost step. The comprehensive analysis should be based on –
- User Satisfaction and Feedback
- Loading Time
- Reported Problems
- Error Rates
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
All the above factors can be used to gain valuable insights and make data-driven decisions that enhance the app’s performance and user experience.
Fixing Bugs, Errors and Glitches
Identifying and fixing errors is one of the most crucial steps of the mobile app maintenance process. Negligence towards fixing bugs and glitches might irritate your users to the extent that they switch to your competition. Therefore, prioritize fixing all the bugs and glitches reported by your users.
Keep up with the latest market trends
Keeping up with the market trends is equally important. Businesses must give their users a “wow” movement on the first interaction. The market trend keeps changing with time, and companies need to stay aware of the same to get a competitive advantage by meeting customer expectations.
Add Essential Features
Businesses are rapidly evolving and growing by introducing unique features in their digital product. Therefore, integrating new features in your application is considered a mobile app maintenance best practice. Certain practices can be carried out to prepare the list of necessary features.
- Go through user’s ratings, reviews, and feedback
- Market Research
- A/B Testing
- Study and analyze the competition
- MVP Approach
- User Testing
- Conduct Surveys
Quality Analysis and Testing
Last but not least, the team of QA and testers came into action. Once you have implemented all the necessary changes in your mobile application, it’s time to test the application and ensure that it meets quality standards.
What Is the Cost of Mobile App Maintenance?
Finding out mobile app maintenance costs is tricky as it hinges on multiple factors. Here is a quick look at the factors influencing the cost of mobile app maintenance.
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Factors that Decide Mobile App Maintenance Cost
App Complexity
Applications with extensive integrations and features are more challenging to maintain as they generally require more resources and effort to function smoothly. The mobile app maintenance cost of such a complex app is higher than usual mobile apps.
Maintenance Frequency
The frequency of app maintenance services also affects the cumulative cost of mobile app maintenance. Routine maintenance services help minimize the overall cost as issues are addressed timely.
Security Updates
Some security vulnerabilities are easier to fix than others, and some apps are easier to make secure than others. So, the cost of fixing security vulnerabilities varies depending upon the complexity and vulnerability of security measures.
Feature Enhancements
Adding innovative features or improving existing ones requires the attention and expertise of Android app developers, designers, coders, and testers, directly impacting the mobile app maintenance cost.
User Feedback Integration
Making user-centric enhancements and integrating user feedback can cost anywhere between $5,000 to $20,000 or more, depending upon the round of changes.
Compliance and Regulations
Keeping up with changing regulations can be expensive, as it may require legal advice, audits, and development work to ensure the app meets the new rules.
Performance Optimization
The costs of making an application run smoothly depend on the count of issues related to the app’s performance and the complexity of fixing those problems.
Server and Infrastructure Costs
Maintaining the servers that keep your app up-to-date and enable it to handle more users also adds to the cost of maintaining your app.
Testing and Quality Assurance
To ensure that maintenance updates are not home to new problems, testing them thoroughly is essential. This can be expensive, but avoiding bigger problems in the long run is worth it.
Emergency Maintenance
Fixing unexpected problems in an app can be more expensive because they must be fixed quickly and carefully to avoid downtime.
These are some of the factors that can influence the mobile app maintenance cost. However, the cost of maintaining a mobile application is usually 15% to 20% of its total app development cost. If you have spent around $100K on developing an application, The app maintenance would cost approximately $15K to $20K.
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How to Reduce Mobile App Maintenance Cost?
As the mobile application maintenance cost falls between 15% to 20% of the total app development cost, we have decided to devise some strategies to help you minimize maintenance expenses.
Careful Development Planning
The best way to cut the maintenance cost is to design your app carefully from the beginning and consider points like scalability, maintenance, and flexibility.
Regular Testing and Quality Assurance
Test your app thoroughly throughout development and at the times when you make changes. Finding and fixing problems early can save you a lot of money in the long run.
Use Agile Development Practices
Agile development methods like Scrum or Kanban can be adopted to build your app in small steps and get feedback from users often. This can help you make changes quickly and easily and avoid making expensive mistakes. You can avail of our iPhone app development solutions at easy prices.
Modular Development Approach
Build your app using smaller and independent components. This makes updating and maintaining those parts easier without breaking the rest of the app.
Automated Testing and Deployment
Leverage technologies like AI and ML to enable automated testing and deployment to release your app faster and with fewer problems. Automated tests can find bugs early, which is cheaper than fixing them later.
Clean Code and Documentation
Write your code neatly and clearly, and document it well. This will make it easier for other developers to understand and work on your app, which can save time and money.
Scalable Infrastructure
Use cloud infrastructure that can expand and shrink as needed, so you don’t have to pay for resources you’re not using.
How Does Octal IT Solution Help in Mobile App Maintenance?
App maintenance services are essential to ensure that businesses can consistently offer their customers highly scalable, adaptable, and secure mobile applications. Octal IT Solution carries out mobile app maintenance best practices to enable its clients to stay aligned with technological and business advancements. Our services cater to a wide range of operating systems and devices available.
Our team comprises experienced maintenance engineers, quality analysts, and testers who possess knowledge of the latest technologies. As a leading mobile app development company, we are well-equipped to redesign and optimize mobile applications according to business requirements.
Our mobile app maintenance services include multiple steps covering crucial aspects such as fixing bugs, development environment management, and server maintenance. We have got you covered, even if you have a legacy app. So, feel free to reach out to us to upgrade and modernize your mobile app.
Summing Up
Our mobile app maintenance cost guide has provided you with a clear understanding of why app maintenance and support have evolved from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to an absolute necessity. Integrating regular maintenance into your development process is imperative whether you embark on developing a small application or feature-rich software. This approach will enable you to build a scalable, long-term business, achieve ambitious objectives, and maintain relevance in the competitive landscape.
However, you need a well-devised plan and a reliable partner to effectively address issues and rectify bugs. Octal IT Solution delivers top-notch mobile app maintenance services to app owners. In addition to our development services, we offer dedicated mobile app maintenance packages. If you’re seeking insights into your system’s mobile app maintenance requirements and the right course of action, don’t hesitate to consult our team. We are committed to providing tailor-made packages and exceptional solutions that align with your mobile app maintenance objectives.
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