After spending hundreds of hours thinking about your app concept and even more hours on its implementation, you’ve finally developed your masterpiece. Nevertheless, your work is not finished. There’s a popular misconception that a Mobile App can be built once and deployed forever. Unfortunately, it’s not how it works in practice. If your app stably works today, it doesn’t mean that it will always be so. Times change and so do requirements for apps.

Various versions of operating system

Undoubtedly, your app perfectly works on the current operating system. However, every year people get a new version of iOS and Android. What happens then? Each time one of these updates hits your users’ devices, there is a high chance that some features of your app will fail to work properly.

That’s why your maintenance plan should include proactive audits that take place as soon as developers get a beta version of a new operating system. That will allow you to get an idea of those changes that’ll be necessary. You should make all these changes before your users get a new version of the OS.

Security updates

As far as Mobile App Maintenance goes, you’ll need to spend time on security updates. Such updates are crucially important as they ensure the integrity of your app as well as your users’ information/data.

Remember that no one is safe from bugs and various security holes as they can pop up at any time. Make sure that your programming team is capable of fixing any issue as soon as they arise.

User Interface

Despite the fact that any user is always glad to see new features and improvements, they also expect the User Interface to stay relatively modern. A UI that’s cool today, will be outdated within a year.

Users want your application to look and feel top notch.

Another important aspect of maintaining the UI is that every year manufacturers release new devices with various screen sizes (this is especially true for Android users). Imagine how a UI that was designed for a small screen will look like on a larger one. Odds are, it’s not going to look very good.

New enhancements and features

Here, there are two possible case scenarios. When you develop your app with a specific goal, and it perfectly achieves it, adding new features may be not so important. That’s an exception to the rule.

However, if your app is important to business and users, it’d be better to update it at least once a year with new features or some enhancements to previous features.

Software Libraries

If you’re using software libraries in your application, make sure your development team keeps them up to date when any contained libraries are updated. Using an obsolete library makes it diffucult to implement new features and get the most out of new devices’ functionality.

Performance Optimization

Bear in mind a good rule: “Your system can always perform better.” There are major and minor changes that can be made to your server-side system and front-end integration that will be able to speed it up. You’ll also be able to integrate technologies to speed up your server-side system without changing the infrastructure. Here are the most common integrations.

File Compression. Compression will be especially useful if your application uses large files. For example, it can be images that need to be loaded from the server. Imagine a situation when your friend takes a photo and uploads this photo to an application.

In its turn, the application sends this photo to the server. After this, the server compresses the file and stores it. How can it actually be useful? This is pretty simple. You’ll receive a photo that is smaller. Consequently, the loading will be much quicker.

Caching. This feature allows for storing information locally on the device. Caching is very useful, as it removes the unnecessary loading of information from the server (that usually slows the system down).

Your users should see that you actually care

Users wait for new updates. It’s the updates that keep them using your app. Having kept your app updated with new features, even if they’re small, as well as embracing the design language of your target platform, you’ll be letting your users know that you really care.

When you release a new update, you let your users know that you haven’t forgotten them. You let them know that they can rely on your application no matter what. That any data stored in the app that they access on a regular basis will continue to be available to them.

Your users, in turn, will thank you by a greater number of installs, more market penetration, as well as a better reputation.

Here’s a list of other areas that might actually change an app’s release and thus, will need maintenance.

• Programming language. You need to update apps based on changes to various programming languages (such as Swift, Objective C, Java or HTML5)
• Style and design. From time to time you need to change style and design. The same goes for usage patterns.
• Infrastructure. Bear in mind that any time the infrastructure on which your app is hosted changes, you need to update your app. Especially when you switch from self-hosting to a larger hosting platform.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, App Maintenance is as equally important as its development. When we talk about app maintenance, it means that you should keep your app up-to-date as well as fight off bugs. Which, in its turn, requires constant vigilance and a good system in place.

Companies that are really good at mobile app maintenance are never talked about simply because of the fact that everything works fine. If you’re doing your job properly, you may not get the recognition you want, though the results will be forthcoming. Make no mistake, your wallet will thank you for it later!

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Here Is What You Should Include in Your Mobile App Maintenance Plan was originally published in JetRuby on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.