Mobile app maintenance services: What helps your application to stay relevant

Your app has been deployed to the app stores and you're getting your first users. Sounds like a win-win situation — time to celebrate. However, it's just the beginning of the journey. Introducing a refined product is an achievement for sure, but there should be something that helps keep the app relevant — mobile app maintenance services. In this article, we'll discuss why it is important for further product development, what maintenance should include, look at the differences between mobile and web app maintenance, and see what tech tools real software companies use to maintain applications.

In simple terms, mobile app maintenance services ensure that your application operates smoothly, remains bug-free, and receives regular updates after software development is done.

Most mobile apps release updates annually. For instance, Google Play statistics demonstrate that 94% of mobile applications follow this schedule. Monthly updates come in second place at 63% frequency — a fairly high rate. The least popular plan includes weekly updates, encompassing 25% of applications.

The stats from the Apple App Store show almost the same results. Hence, the golden mean to stay competitive and not overload users seems to lie closer to monthly updates.

What do mobile app maintenance services include?

Therefore, once a mobile app has gone live, it signifies the beginning, not the end, of a successful operation journey. To maintain the mobile app development pace, retain the initial users, and attract more, ongoing app maintenance services are vital. Application support includes procedures that help the application stay functional, up-to-date, and secure. What is the purpose of mobile app maintenance?

Rollout updates

As we've mentioned, updating the mobile application so that it can successfully fit into the changing standards of the current requirements is essential. Regular updates are necessary not only for improving user experience but also for enhancing security measures.

Meet users needs

The initial product release provides the first opportunity to collect real users' reactions and understand if they need the service and what improvements can be made. For further calibrations, the application should undergo app support to implement necessary changes timely.

Address issues

App maintenance services offer robust monitoring procedures that help identify and resolve bugs and issues as they arise. The idea of hiring a mobile app development team each time an application encounters a problem would be a rather risky approach.

However, some might believe that allocating major resources at the beginning of mobile app development could nullify the need for application support in the future. While creating a quality product right from the start is an admirable goal, the application won't be able to survive on the market without maintenance. Let's see why.

Why is mobile app support essential for your product?

It is cost-effective

It might sound biased, but hiring a dedicated team for app support can be a cost-saving decision in the long run. A timely response to occurring bugs and prompt updates can save resources that would otherwise be spent on resolving major issues caused by significant system failures.

In our practice, we encountered a case where after studying a client's mobile application with SonarQube and IntelliJ IDEA tools, we found that mobile app maintenance cost would be too high due to poor-quality code. Writing numerous autotest code lines for bug monitoring would be more expensive than rewriting the entire app from scratch. This issue could have been prevented by writing clear code from the start and providing professional application support.

Helps to win the competition

Regular updates under application support keep a product current. App stores always indicate the last time an application was updated. Considering the difficulty of remaining users, with only 21% remaining after the first day and merely 2,61% after 30 days, some consumers may notice if an app hasn't been updated since the previous year and choose not to install it at all.

The lack of app support might become clear over time as the app development industry changes rapidly. This can be evident even in the look of the application. For instance, if Instagram had never changed its interface since the 2010s, it would look very outdated today:

No one would want to use it if the app didn't introduce new features, designs, or even minor changes. A well-performed application support can clearly indicate to users that it is being regularly updated and taken care of.

Prevents data loss

Regular backups help prevent data loss in the application. A report by Statista indicates that almost half of the respondents would stop using an app if they had even slight concerns about data protection. To ensure data protection, ready-made certified solutions like Service Organization Controls 2 (SOC2) can be used without any hesitation.

At Ronas IT, we use the least privilege approach and fine-grained access control during mobile app development and after. These tools restrict access to certain data, signifying that even developers may not have full access to some information. Therefore, choosing a company that adheres to standards for mobile app development and app support can ensure data security.

Adapts the app to market trends

Mobile app markets are constantly evolving with new features, trends, and technologies emerging regularly. Ongoing app maintenance enables your app to remain relevant and competitive by adjusting to these changes. It ensures your app incorporates the latest trends and meets the continuously changing user expectations and market standards. Without app support, your product could potentially lose its competitive edge and fall behind in the market.

Each month, the Apple App Store has over 30 thousand new applications uploaded. In February 2024, the number of new mobile apps released on the platform reached 37 thousand. One can only imagine the intensity of the competition in every industry of mobile app development.

Improves the app's performance

If the application shows poor performance, users will undoubtedly abandon it. To prevent such a situation, application support measures greatly contribute to enhancing the application's speed and efficiency. This can be achieved by code and database optimization, refreshing the user interfaces, stress testing to check if the app can work under significant loads, and cache cleanup.

In addition to these procedures, simply removing unnecessary elements can be beneficial. During maintenance, some features might hinder the user experience or prove to be inefficient for real users. If the app is undergoing maintenance, removing a certain element for better app performance won't be a major issue. Conversely, during regular updates, developers can implement new features that enhance the application's performance.

What is the difference between mobile and web application maintenance?

To better understand the specificity of mobile app support, it can be useful to compare it to web app or website maintenance. There are a few noticeable differences:

Versioning

Speaking of app updates, web development, and mobile app engineering follow distinct processes. The first ones are deployed to the client-side and server-side, while mobile applications require the retention of the previous version, even after a new release to app stores. Unlike web development, the mobile app release process is spread over time. Developers cannot control whether or not users have installed the new version of the product on their devices. Therefore, the server must maintain both old and new versions simultaneously — this practice is called versioning.Speaking of app updates, web development, and mobile app engineering follow distinct processes. The first ones are deployed to the client-side and server-side, while mobile applications require the retention of the previous version, even after a new release to app stores. Unlike web development, the mobile app release process is spread over time. Developers cannot control whether or not users have installed the new version of the product on their devices. Therefore, the server must maintain both old and new versions simultaneously — this practice is called versioning.

Security requirementsSecurity requirements

To ensure a secure mobile app performance, regular updates are vital, due to the applications' reliance on evolving operating systems. While web apps principally operate through browsers, thereby eliminating the need for frequent security updates, the upkeep of any technology necessitates regular updates. Although most technologies update automatically, it is important to regularly implement new best practices into the product manually as well.To ensure a secure mobile app performance, regular updates are vital, due to the applications' reliance on evolving operating systems. While web apps principally operate through browsers, thereby eliminating the need for frequent security updates, the upkeep of any technology necessitates regular updates. Although most technologies update automatically, it is important to regularly implement new best practices into the product manually as well.

Tools and frameworksTools and frameworks

Maintainability truly originates at the development stage. An app's performance heavily relies on transparent and scalable coding. If a company decides to further develop a product with another vendor, it may be impossible to make corrections if the code is challenging to read and modify. A certain divergence between mobile and web development occurs here. There is no room for uniqueness in technology selection and our company utilizes the most popular tools in the industry. We use React and Laravel frameworks for web app development and prefer the React Native cross-platform framework for mobile app development.Maintainability truly originates at the development stage. An app's performance heavily relies on transparent and scalable coding. If a company decides to further develop a product with another vendor, it may be impossible to make corrections if the code is challenging to read and modify. A certain divergence between mobile and web development occurs here. There is no room for uniqueness in technology selection and our company utilizes the most popular tools in the industry. We use React and Laravel frameworks for web app development and prefer the React Native cross-platform framework for mobile app development.

Optimization procedures

App performance optimization is crucial in both mobile and web development, though the methods differ. For mobile application maintenance, it's important to consistently enhance user experience and optimize aspects such as battery and CPU usage. However, for website maintenance, priority is given to load time and resource efficiency as it's crucial for a website to adapt to varying internet speeds.

Connectivity problems

Unlike web applications, mobile apps frequently allow offline operation. Hence, mobile app support deals with issues such as restoring the user state upon reconnection, data synchronization, and offline data storage. Meanwhile, web app updates are easier to manage as they typically function with a network connection only.

Update deployment

Update deployment varies between mobile and web apps due to their differing storage and access methods. Web app updates are deployed on the server and are immediately available to users. Mobile app updates, however, are deployed via the Google and Apple app stores and then have to be installed by the users. This process is more time-consuming and complex for application maintenance.

A deeper insight into the measures taken during the mobile app maintenance process is gained by discussing actual services. The following describes mobile app maintenance services as provided by Ronas IT.

How maintenance services are performed by Ronas IT

We consider our application maintenance and support service as a part of our DevOps services. Once the project has been released and transmitted to the live environment, we start to monitor and support the production environment. What are the actions that our team performs to take care of your application maintenance after its launch?

Monitoring

Our specialists consistently monitor your application environment. Should any issues arise, we ensure their resolution within 24 hours. This guarantees the constant stability of your environment. Additionally, we automate the monitoring process with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.

Regular updates

We carry out timely updates on all components of your environment. Our team ensures that no components become outdated and we continually update the security measures of the application to keep your data protected.

Readiness

The goal of app support and maintenance is to keep the product infrastructure ready for development. This means that the system is always prepared for either scaling up, scaling down, or continuing with the ongoing development process.

Cost management

We assist our clients in identifying areas where the expense of maintenance services can be significantly reduced. Often, a lot of resources are invested initially, during the first release, and the mobile app maintenance costs should naturally decrease over time. However, without someone monitoring, these costs remain the same, resulting in the client consistently paying more than necessary. Through our active monitoring and management, we prevent this from happening and ensure you only pay for what you need.

Help desk

For clients using our mobile app maintenance services, we have established a help desk for timely application support and assistance. We believe that maintaining consistent communication with the client is very important. Transparency and communication are among our primary values, which is why we want to be available whenever a client needs us.

Technologies for automated monitoring

We've briefly mentioned the technologies that we use for the monitoring of applications, but haven't mentioned the reason for using them. Here's a brief review of each.

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution that allows tracking data and creating visuals in the form of presentations. Prometheus efficiently stores data in your local memory and disk. Each server operates independently and relies only on local storage which makes Prometheus a reliable tool.

Prometheus has an alertmanager which controls notifications and silencing. There are many client libraries for easy instrumentation of services. The technology supports over ten languages. Integrating third-party libraries is also easy with Prometheus. It's already compatible with various applications, system statistics, Docker, and more.

Grafana

Grafana is a tool for data visualization and monitoring solutions. Its main functionality is to streamline troubleshooting, help make informed decisions, and observe system performance. The Grafana suit has all possible ways of visualization from heatmaps to 3D charts. It offers over 150 plugins for efficient data monitoring.

The latest update of Grafana lets developers share the dashboard with anyone (in case a client would like to see the proof) and integrate dashboards into applications if needed. Grafana makes the system easily observable so that anyone working on the product can monitor the troubleshooting, not just a single person with Ops knowledge.

Loki (Grafana)

Loki is a log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus and powered by Grafana. Logs are records of computer system activity. Hence, Loki helps to store, manage, and examine logs from all applications and infrastructure. This is a system that is easy to manage and, to scale it, the only thing needed is to add more servers.

Unlike many other log systems, Loki doesn't index the contents of the logs themselves. Instead, it indexes a set of labels for each log stream, making it more efficient and simpler to operate. Also, Loki allows for setting up alerting rules based on incoming log data. If an alert is detected, Loki sends information to Prometheus alertmanager, which then reports it to the team.

To summarize

Mobile app maintenance services are a cost-effective tool that helps keep mobile applications up-to-date and functional. While it may initially appear to be an excessive expense, it is in fact a necessity. Mobile app maintenance helps keep pace with changing standards, resolves performance issues promptly, safeguards user data, and maintains modernity.

Hiring a dedicated team for mobile app maintenance can conserve resources in the long term and help prevent bugs and major system problems arising due to neglected or delayed maintenance.

Our dedicated team is always ready to ensure your mobile app operates effectively and is equipped with longevity and security. Should you wish to discuss any issues you have with the current state of your application, do not hesitate to contact us via the short form below this page.