So, you’ve created a mobile app! Congratulations. Mobile apps are a terrific way to connect with users through their smartphones or tablets. By inculcating your app with desirable features related to your business, you can keep users engaged with your company via the mobile app for years to come. However, releasing a mobile app is not a one-step process. Rather, releasing a mobile app brings with it the obligation of conducting mobile app maintenance and updates. Though updates and maintenance may not be the most exciting words in the dictionary, these processes help you keep your mobile app relevant, secure and appealing to users over the long-term. Mobile app creation goes hand in hand with app development and app maintenance. To keep the performance of your mobile app on track, regularly updating your app plays a significant role. But how often should you update your mobile app, and what exactly should you update? Today we will discuss the particulars of mobile app maintenance, and the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of mobile app software updates. Ultimately, if you keep your app updated and maintained it will work with the latest iterations of iOS and Android software. Staying compatible with these platforms may be a major way you keep your mobile app relevant, so be sure to read on to find out why.
What Are the Benefits to Updating Your App?
There are many benefits to updating your app, probably too many to mention in this blog, so we will begin with the most salient.
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- Boosted Security:- One of the primary and necessary benefits of updating your mobile app is bolstering its online security. In general, hackers and threat agents find hacking older apps easier to hack. According to Securityintelligence.com, malware and malicious telemetry has increased by 30% since 2018, suggesting a continued rise in mobile app hacking. Furthermore, almost half of all businesses experienced cyber security attacks in the past twelve months. The bottom line? If your business has a mobile app, you should stay up to date on the latest security measures to secure your mobile app from outside threats.
- Better Customer Engagement:- You can improve your customer engagement immediately by improving the user’s experience in-app. That means that by adding new, exciting features as well as updates to your UX/UI design, your client will have more reasons to spend time on your app. Particularly if you are a free mobile app, you want to get users engaged. The bulk of your revenue will come from advertising and in-app purchases, and if you have an out-of-date design your users might gravitate towards other, similar apps with more eye-catching designs.You can also perform addition by subtraction: removing hard-to-use features or correcting an overly complicated UI to simplify the user experience. Paired with user-data collection through cookies or pixels, you can update your app according to the behaviors of your users to maximize their overall user experience in-app.
- Ironing Out Bugs and Glitches :- One of the most common reasons to update an app is to deal with the bugs and glitches that naturally occur during the software development process. Updating your software naturally creates bugs in your system, threatening to derail the usability of your app. If you do find a lot of bugs in your app, you do not need to panic at first – every update reveals bugs and glitches. However, if you can deal with the most pressing of these bugs as soon as you can, you will have a much better shot at user satisfaction. If you correct these bugs quick enough, chances are users will not be able to tell the difference.
- Carving Out a Signature Space in Your Market If you want to define your space in the market, your app should do more than just cover basic functions. Software updates are a great way to cultivate a brand identity: by fleshing out color and shape themes in your UI design, integrating with other apps like Venmo for payment, and by quickly removing bugs that made the app difficult-to-use in the past. Thinking about your app as its own separate entity helps you see the app as more than just a set of features. Focusing on what makes your app different, and producing software updates to accentuate those differences may help you get an edge on your market competitors.
How Often Should You Update Your App?
Ideally, you should update your app at least every 15-45 days. However, how often you update your app may ultimately come down to how big your team is and whether your app is a paid app or a free app. Here are the suggested intervals for updating your mobile app between free and paid models: Free app – every 2-3 weeks Paid app – every 7-8 weeks Important also to remember: each feature takes time to actually build, so if you want to include a new feature in an update, you should block out time for its development ahead of time. Rushed features on updates tend to backfire, especially if their addition brings bugs and lag time. How often you update your software also depends on both the size of your mobile app development team and the demand for your app. If your team is small, you may not be able to update your software every week – and that is okay, especially for a smaller app. If your app suddenly gets more traction, then you may want to expand your team and hire more members to be able to put out more updates as the demand requires. Another key consideration: not all features turn out the way you would like them to. Software updates are an ongoing process that reward repeated attention. If you are able to update your app at regular intervals, even if those intervals are spaced out, you have a better chance at presenting your business as running your app well. If you are interested in discussing your app or mobile app maintenance with a professional team trained in mobile app development, be sure to reach out to OpenSource’s account manager or sales team.