App maintenance? what is it and how much it cost

Mobile apps are gaining importance in every industry because they have helped the users to manage things available on the fingertips. You have worked on your app idea and hired the Chicago’s best app developers to launch your app on the stores (iOS and Android ). Since launching a mobile app is not enough, you have to update and maintain your app as well. Maintenance of an app includes taking care of bugs, supporting a new version of OS (operating system), feature enhancement, and others.  There are a lot more things that need to be done to keep your app alive. While planning for your app development, you should be aware of the app maintenance and the cost involved in the process. Here are the details of different types of app maintenance and the cost involved.

1. The necessity of App Maintenance

Now, when you are thinking of app maintenance, you need to understand its necessity. App maintenance is necessary for every app because that will help your launched app to stay relevant and competitive. App maintenance will help you to take care of the issues, such as bugs, crashes, glitches, and other issues that affect your app efficiency. Whenever iOS and Android launch a new version of the operating system, you will have to make sure your app is functioning right. You may have to make coding changes that update your app with the latest operating system. The timely updates in your apps will help your app be more appealing and engage the users with it. They will provide reviews and feedback on your app functioning on the app store. Their review will make you aware of the latest trends in the app market and their expectations and wants from your app. App maintenance will help you to fulfill the desired requirements of the users in your mobile app. Regular app maintenance will help to optimize the effectiveness of the mobile app.

2. Common forms of app maintenance:

2.1 Fixing the bugs

You may find bugs in your app like app crashing or poor performance on certain screens. You have to identify those issues and ask your developers to fix them. App crashes and issues will drive users away from your mobile app and increase the risk of more uninstallation of your mobile app. You don’t want users to get disappointed with the app performance because it takes a lot to have someone download your app and try it. You can add crash reporting tools like Crashlytics or Bugsnag to get the reports on crashes. They will provide insight on what issue caused the crashes. You should also embed analytics SDK like google analytics in your app to monitor the performance of the app. These tools make it easier for your developer to identify the issues and fix them.

2.2 Functions and Feature Update

When you have launched your app for the first time, it might not be a perfect app.  The reason is that you have not users with a full-feature version of your app. You will learn about the latest features based upon user feedback and reviews on what features you should add or remove in your app. Users’ feedback and reviews are one of the primary reasons for feature updates in your app. The other reason could be the competition, your competitor may have launched a feature that is attracting users and you also want to stand out. The update of the new features based on the feedback of the users will help your app to retain. Sometimes, you may come up with an innovative feature your own and wants to add that in the app. Sometimes, when you have a large user base, you may modify the design to provide something new to the customer. All these require app maintenance.

2.3 Operating System Upgrade

The operating system (iOS and Android) provides regular updates to increase the performance of smartphones. Typically, a major update happens once a year or two minor updates come out annually. The latest OS update might not support your app. Therefore, you should always test your app on the latest OS version to ensure that it is functioning correctly. If your app does not have an updated OS version, then your app might get crashes, feedback or bad reviews. Sometimes, OS updates can be big, for example, in 2017, Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps and fully migrated to 64-bits. That required a lot of coding work for many apps to function. Most of the minor OS updates are backward compatible, which means that they are supposed to support the existing app without any code changes. iOS and Android always follow a schedule to update the apps and they always inform all app developers and app owners about the upcoming OS versions. They launch the beta version of OS to developers in advance so that they could test their apps and make necessary changes ahead of time. If you have apps on the store, you should be aware of upcoming versions and test your app.

Below is a table of the last few versions of iOS and Android OS:

2.4 Updating the UI/UX designs

To have an engaging user base, you continuously need to focus on improving the user experience and user interface. Many times smartphone companies launch a new phone with the bigger screen size and you have to update your app design to ensure that it works on new screens. For example, iPhone X was launched with bigger screen sizes, the reason that several apps to update the designs. Sometimes, market trends changes, you should keep your app updated with the changing styles. The update in the UX/UI designs provides the user with a sense that the app creators are interested in providing the best values to their customers. Sometimes, you will get feedback from users that certain design aspects are not good then, you have to make customization, accordingly.

2.5 Security updates

The biggest upcoming threat to the app ecosystem is cybersecurity.  Mobile apps access several personal data from devices, social media, and sometimes medical devices like heart rate meter. Many times they ask users to enter sensitive data like credit card information, SSN, health data, location, and pictures. Hackers try to attach apps to capture this data. You may learn of these security threats after you launched your app. This may require you to update your app code or backend code where you store the data. If you are launching a healthcare app, you may have to make HIPAA compliant to protect the health data. Any app that is for payments required to be PCI compliant. You should check if your app needs to adhere to any compliance. There are certain features you can have in your app to protect it from security threats. Some of these common features are:

• Enabling your mobile app with the fingerprint logins
• Not securing data in the app locally.
• Encrypt all the data saved locally.
• If transmitting data to a backend, make sure to have client-server encryption.
• If saving data in the backend, decrypt the data.
• Use SSL certificates on the backend server.

3. Cost of App Maintenance::

3.1 Labor cost for Bugs, Enhances, and Upgrades

For the proper app maintenance, you have to retain the app development team. It is always advisable to have the original team who have developed your app. The reason is that they have written the original and knows the existing architecture. It is a lot easier for them to update the code in the app. You should have a support agreement with them that defines how much they would charge you hourly for the support of the app. If your app developer is in the USA, your hourly support cost may be from $60-$150 per hour, depending upon who is maintaining your app. If you are budgeting for the Bugs, Enhancements, and updates then, a typical budget should be around 20% of the cost it took to build the app. For example, if you spend $30,000 to build the app, you should allocate around $6000 for the first year of maintenance.

3.2 App Store Cost

App stores(iOS and Android) charge annual fees to keep your apps live in the app stores. Apple charges $99 a year for the apple developer account to publish an app. You can use one account to publish multiple apps. Google charges a one time fee of $25 to upload an app on the store. The account charges of the app stores are generally on a percentage basis. Therefore, the more your app downloads from the stores there is an increase in the app store cost. When it comes to payout, the google store is more frequent than the apple store. Google store provides the payout within a few days after the end of the month. On the other hand, the Apple store takes 30 days for the payouts.

3.3 Server Hosting Fees

You might have a backend server database for your app. The server hosting fees depend upon the data usage and activities that are performing in your mobile app. Generally, companies use Amazon AWS, Azure, and other cloud-based hosting services. If you use the database provided by AWS like DynamoDB, or AWS Relational database, your hosting cost may be higher. When you use database service provided by AWS/Azure then, they will charge you based upon how many tables you create and the read/write capacity of the tables. If you use open-source databases like MySQL on EC2 servers, the cost will be less. They also charge you based upon how many calls you make to the server. The other cost that you have to consider is the cost to store media files, like video, audio, images, and PDF documents. AWS has S3 storage services for a media file that is very inexpensive. Once you have launched your app and have sufficient users, then you will get an idea of the hosting fees. Simpalm is the most affordable Startup app development company, many of our startup clients pay in the range of $20-$60 a month for server hosting services. If you pay $100 a month that means, you have a lot of active users and your app has got good traction in the market. The server fees are month to month basis, it is not an annual contract.

2.4 Data backup

Data backup is also a considerable thing in app maintenance. You can backup your app data manually or ask the cloud provider to restore and data backup. You should perform the data backup task regularly. This is helpful at the time when you lose your app data due to some issues, then you can easily recover the data. The data backup comes handy in the situation when someone hacked into your system, and try to erase the data. The cost of data backup is not much with cloud service providers. AWS charges roughly $1 a month to backup 20 GB of data.

3.5 Analytics

Most of the apps launched in the store have some analytical tools in it to capture more data about user behavior. You can find several analytical tools that are free like Flurry, Apsalar, and google analytics. There are paid analytics tools that will charge you monthly fees for usage. Depending upon what you decide to use, you should consider the cost associated with it.