kamran sharief Mobile application development is an exhausting process that can take anywhere from a few weeks to many, many months. Whether you are a growing start-up or a large organization, you must have invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into launching your very own mobile app. The development process covers everything, from market research power tool and design to implementation and successful market release of the product. Is your work done after the app is distributed to its intended end-users? Absolutely not!
The app development process continues for as long as the mobile app is up and running in the market, i.e., its entire lifetime. It goes on in the form of a very important phase of the software development life cycle: application maintenance and support.
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In this article, we will talk about some of the key reasons why it is extremely important to properly maintain your app and get steady support from experts. Here are five reasons why you should consider investing in proper application maintenance services.
Table of Contents
Avoid Downtime
While periodic downtime can be a great source of relief for human beings, the same does not apply to mobile apps, unfortunately. Making your mark with your mobile app offering can be a challenging task. With such tough competition in the mobile app landscape, users are quick to move to apps that are readily available and accessible to them.
If your app faces too many breakdowns and frequent occurrences of bugs or errors, your users will quickly find a replacement app that offers higher consistency in its performance and gives them what they need as soon as they ask for it. Therefore, it is important to hire a reliable application support services provider who will resolve any issues that your app runs into. Many providers are available 24×7 – even on public holidays! – to monitor your app’s performance and ensure that it stays up continuously and steadily. They maintain apps in such a way that any potential issues are eliminated before they can even occur. However, in case any unforeseeable event does take place, your support team should be on standby and able to resolve the issue immediately.
Stay on the App Store
Both Google and Apple have their own platforms where you can launch your Android and iOS apps, respectively. These app stores are a great means of reaching a wide audience. However, there are certain quality standards that you need to meet in order for your app to be allowed on the app store.
The stores’ rules and regulations have changed over time, and continue to be updated periodically. If in the future, your app fails to meet the updated guidelines or benchmarks, it may end up being removed from the store. You could face great losses this way. All of your efforts would go to waste. Returning or potential customers would not be able to access and install your app any longer. It would soon become obsolete for existing customers too, with no option to update it. Therefore, it is important that your application maintenance and support services provider keeps your app up-to-date by following the latest guidelines for both Android and iOS app stores.
Retain Customers
In order to establish a positive brand image for your business and also successfully sustain it, you need to be consistent with your products and services.
With a stable first release, coupled with some amazing marketing campaigns and strategies for the initial launch of your mobile app, you may effectively be able to acquire new customers. However, that should not be your only goal when starting a business. One of your long-term goals should be to retain existing customers, and this can only be achieved if you keep meeting your customers’ or users’ increasing demands and expectations. Thus, it is important to invest in proper application maintenance services.
Stay on Top of Recent Trends
An important point that is also a key part of customer retention is the need for staying relevant. Every day, there are new technologies and trends that we see being implemented within the newer mobile apps. Your app and the technologies that it uses can become obsolete really quickly, especially with the plethora of alternate options readily available for users.
Constant application maintenance and support will enable you to enhance your app’s performance or, at the very least, maintain it. With regular upgrades, you can offer improved UI and UX to your app’s users. With new apps being launched on the app stores every day, you must regularly update your app’s design to match the latest design trends and practices so you can give your competition a tough time. It is also important to make sure that your app is compatible with newer platforms, such as the latest Android or iOS versions. Certain hardware changes may also have to be taken into account. A good example here would be the introduction of biometric features in newer apps that use the in-built fingerprint sensor that comes with recently launched smartphones.
You can keep adding more features to your app over time so that users do not feel that some of their needs are not being satisfied via your app. You can use certain tools to monitor user behaviour and usage patterns and make upgrades accordingly to keep your customers happy and content. Also, You might even end up saving some time and resources by looking into and eliminating features that users don’t seem very interested in.
Sustain Security
With regular and rapid technological advancements over time, along with more and more people shifting most of their business operations as well as personal activities online, security has become a major threat. Cybercriminals keep coming up with innovative ways to compromise security and privacy of users online. To tackle these threats efficiently and effectively, you need to make your app fully secure. Conduct periodic tests to make sure there is no vulnerability that attackers could possibly exploit. This can be easily achieved with a reliable application maintenance and support services provider.