The Importance of Regular App Maintenance: How to Protect Your Business

The sad truth is that the cost of application maintenance has reached its all-time high. It has been estimated that application maintenance costs account for more than 90% of the total cost of application development, as compared to 50% just a decade ago.

Think of your app as a house. After the purchase, you will have to invest in keeping it clean, upgrading it, and generally making sure it is modern and attractive. Maintenance matters, also in the case of app development.

While you cannot entirely prevent bugs, you can certainly apply measures that minimize the consequences of most errors. Preventive application maintenance is the most efficient way of improving the quality, while simultaneously reducing maintenance costs.

Predictive maintenance is a proactive app maintenance strategy that aims at preventing breakdowns. Depending on the data collected and predefined predictive algorithms, it can estimate when a breakdown will occur. Maintenance activities are then scheduled based on advanced forecasts.

Although predictive maintenance is often confused with condition-based maintenance, there is an important nuance that distinguishes them. While predictive maintenance schedules tasks based on collected data, forecasts, and formulas, condition-based maintenance only acts when the same parameters reach alarming levels.

In practice, the process consists of the 3 stages:

• Data collection
• Data mining
• Calculations and Machine Learning

Advantages of predictive maintenance

• The main advantage of predictive maintenance is that it acts in a timely manner, thus, reducing downtime and increasing asset availability.
• It avoids wasting stock and labor in unnecessary maintenance.
• Reducing emergency repairs and wastes, helps to better control your budget.
• Downtime is also planned in advance.
• Optimal use of resources and equipment.

It is worth mentioning that the cost of implementation is also relatively high. But with a high ROI. In fact, it can be up to 10 times the investment.

Long-term application maintenance

Developing an app and launching it is just the beginning of a long-term competitive journey. The world around us is changing, and so do technologies and their markets. As a result, users often expect more.

The process of updating the product and its app enables companies to attract more users while introducing ‘out-of-the-box’ features and an impressive brand at the same time. The frequency of updating an app depends entirely on the business targets, the expected outcomes, and the functionality of the app.

Let’s have a look at the following 5 benefits of predictive app maintenance:

1. Providing an optimal user experience

Monitoring your app performance provides you with valuable information about how your users feel about your app. Keeping track of client feedback and market trends allows you to continuously adapt and fight the competition by following the users’ preferences, issues, and habits.

2. Ensuring long-term revenue

Well-maintained and updated apps can provide numerous financial benefits, such as greater ROI and lower expenditures. Furthermore, by providing new features and tracking their usage over time, you can encourage existing users to interact and convert more frequently.

3. Staying ahead of the competition

In 2023, millions of applications are competing for being installed on your smartphone. Because of this, your app must stand out from the crowd and keep users satisfied.

Continuous bug fixes, technical issues, and no updates? Users will start searching for better solutions.

Maintaining your app over time, surprising your users with its newest functionalities, and following the latest trends is the only way to stay ahead of the competition.

4. Building a stronger brand

Nowadays, your application is like an interactive business card of your brand. An old/slow/poor application will definitely harm your brand, driving current and future users away from it. Naturally, you’ll want to avoid this, so set the right priorities.

5. Avoiding uninstalls

Yes, maintaining an app over time requires a consistent effort to resolve any issue that might appear, while your most valuable asset is your engaged user base. And retaining them should be your primary concern.

How does long-term app maintenance work?

There are a couple of ways to maintain your application, from updating the backend code to adapting your user retention strategy based on the gathered user data. In any case, most of them might be better left to the experts.

When your app is developed by a technological partner (an expert app development company), they will normally offer to provide a maintenance (post-deployment) service. For example:

• Updates for app support

Every year, a new iOS or Android version is released. And as technology advances, your users will continue to expect more.

• Bug fixes

This includes frequent checks and modifications that prevent your users from spotting them first and leaving your app behind.

• Performance analytics

Performance analytics is all about studying metrics and parameters such as your retention and churn rates, consumer usage trends, engagement, and conversion rates.

• Taking care of changing licenses

Using software without the right license often results in high fines. The good news is that this part of maintenance is quite easy to forecast since the dedicated app development experts do it automatically.

• Adding or updating features

Adding feature upgrades to your app based on user feedback and usage statistics keeps users loyal and engaged.

• Upgrading app design

Keeping up with your users’ design preferences is critical to your app's long-term success. This involves maintaining the design of your user interface (UI) to also fit the latest trends at all times.

How much does the maintenance cost?

Maintenance costs vary depending on your app’s functionality, features, licenses, tech stack, and more. Usually, the most cost-effective app maintenance is offered by a development partner.

At Utah Tech Labs, we suggest assigning a budget of 20% of the total cost of the development of your app per year. Our development team helps with tracking improvements and issues while also guaranteeing your app’s performance is top-notch for as long as we take care of it.

Contact our app development experts here - you’ll never leave with uncertainties.

For free consultation about app development experts click here.

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