Mobile App Maintenance – A Luxury Or A Necessity?

You have a mobile app that is used by thousands if not hundreds or thousands of your customers. Or a business critical app that your employees depend upon. Your apps depend on backend components to work. They may be even be tied to mobility specific middleware. All in all a lot of places where failure can occur and cause the app to stop working.

To make sure that outages are handled and do not cause your customers or employees a lot of aggravation and lost productivity, you need to make sure that you have a maintenance strategy in place for your mobile offerings, a strategy that encompasses end to end support.

A mobile maintenance strategy needs to plan for not just critical failures but also more mundane circumstances like upgrading the app to new versions of OS or updating the app when any of the backend APIs change.

Apple, for example, has policies in place that will not let any app to be deployed to the store that is not on iOS7. So even a small enhancement to your app that was built for iOS6 now means that the whole app needs to be migrated to iOS7 before you can get the enhancement out there for your users. So if you haven’t planned for the upgrade early on, now you are forced to do it, in a short amount of time, because you need this enhancement to be rolled out.

Early planning for mobile OS upgrades is a must not only to be competitive but also to be compliant.

Enterprise apps are not immune either. Managing the app deployment environment, setting up users, updating security policies are all necessary to make the day to day smooth functioning of the app seamless and productive. BYOD brings in additional considerations where the fragmentation of the devices and the OS versions require a nimble, effective app upgrade strategy.

Last, but not least, your app users will have feedback for you on how to improve the app. You need to be responsive and get app enhancements out to show your users that you are listening.

So have a good maintenance plan in place – a plan that covers your mobile app ecosystem end to end, a plan that is accounts for OS upgrades, a plan that is responsive to what new features your users want to see in the app.

Start taking a strategic look at mobile app maintenance because your business depends on it. And anything your business depends on is always a necessity, never a luxury.

Share your thoughts on a sound app maintenance strategy in the comment box below !

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