The Comprehensive Guide For Mobile App Maintenance Cost

You know it very well- car maintenance extends the vehicle’s life. Preventive maintenance improves the car mileage, enhances safety on the road, minimizes repair cost, and minimize the chances of car breakdown.

The same goes with the mobile apps after it’s developed and launched. The development company cannot rest on its laurels after the app is built. Instead, the real work starts right from this moment. This is termed as mobile app maintenance.

Mobile app maintenance in a nutshell

Mobile app maintenance involves upgrading the app to keep up with the latest technologies, market trends, and evolving customers’ expectations, fix technical issues, and engineering wow experiences. The top app development agencies add new features, improve existing ones, and remove unnecessary ones for keeping the app secure, reliable, and up-to-date.

Top mobile app development agencies leverages different types of mobile app maintenance such as perfective maintenance, emergency maintenance, corrective maintenance, scheduled maintenance, preventive maintenance, and adaptive maintenance to keep the app up-to-date forever.

Usually mobile app maintenance is not a part of app development. Instead, it’s facilitated by the companies at an additional cost. That’s why getting clear idea about the cost of maintaining a mobile app is important and many a times it will be additional and may not be included in mobile app development cost.

According to Gartner’s research, mobile app maintenance accounts for 34% of IT budgets, but they cut costs by 50%.

Why is mobile app maintenance important for businesses?

Diminish uninstallation

You launched the app and it’s warmly embraced by the users doesn’t mean that this will continue for years to come. Keeping the users engaged and enticed with the app’s functionalities is all-important to make them stay glued to the app. Also, checking their preference for features and notifications regularly is imperative to find out what they expect.

For instance, mobile app maintenance has allowed the apps like- WhatsApp, Instagram, and Uber to stay on top of the ladder with the increasing user base. Continuous monitoring determines what needs to be updated and what not.

Additionally, the app store guidelines keep on changing after an interval, the app needs to update accordingly, or else it negatively impacts the app ranking. The worst situation- the app may be deleted from the app store.

 Deliver the best experiences

No magical ingredient in the app can guarantee the app’s success with exceptional UX. With changing times, the users’ preferences for UI design have also evolved. Now, the users want seamless navigation, minimalistic design, and glitch-free functioning of the app. When user find anything missing, they immediately move to the competition.

The mobile app maintenance ensures everything stays in sync with what users prefer to deliver the best user experiences. The brilliant user experience translates into positive feedback, improved loyalty, strengthen relationships, and increased ROI.

 Improve the bottom line

The mobile app maintenance results in technologically advanced app development that helps in building the goodwill of the application. It further helps in increasing user acquisition, improving user satisfaction, enhancing loyalty, and reducing the cost that ultimately augments the ROI.

Keep the app secured

The increasing popularity of the app makes it prone to security threats. As a business owner, you are responsible to keep the data shared by the customers secured. A single weak point results in personal and financial data hacks. When the payment gateway is integrated, don’t forget to integrate all the security protocols to keep the app secured.

The recurring security updates under the mobile app maintenance umbrella ensure that financial data remain secure. When there is untrusted input identified, the system sends alerts to the concerned person for safety reasons.

Minimize the downtime

App downtime means loss of users and revenue. The leading giants such as Amazon, banking apps, Blackberry, and others have suffered huge revenue losses due to downtimes. It’s caused during the upgrade, improving compatibility, attacks prevention, and others, which is not healthy for businesses.

The analytics provided under preventive maintenance allows developers to gain critical insights and handle downtimes ahead of time.

What’s the cost of maintaining a mobile app to the organizations?

There is no way to estimate a ballpark mobile app maintenance cost as it depends on several factors. Generally, it’s 15-20% of the app development cost, which is sometimes excluded or included under the development package. Native apps demand higher investment as compared to cross-platform app. here are a couple of factors that impact the app development cost.

 Server maintenance

Imagining an app to work without a hosting server is a dream. The app hosting and server cost is the biggest expense in the mobile app maintenance chart. The server need is identified with server resources requirements that can be find out based on the data type that the app will store- static data, dynamic data, multimedia, or terabytes of files.

The data capacity illustrates how much yous server’s memory, disk space, and CPU capacity are required, which will surge with growing data and so is the server cost. The app hosting server cost starts from $100. When the business wants to keep the hosting cost flexible, which means they will pay only for the space consumed.

 Updating the app

Rolling out new features or upgrading UI design is important to stay in sync with the latest trends that appeal to target users. Similar to game apps that update UI design with more advanced levels to keep it intuitive and on-demand delivery apps that are enhancing the tracking system to deliver the best user experience. The features or UI design complexity impact the mobile app maintenance cost that varies from $100 to $300.

Regular updates take the center stage in eliminating the bugs that create an error in the functionality or make the app crash abruptly. The cost of fixing the bugs in a single functionality is around $80. The total mobile app maintenance cost depends on the features that are performing unexpectedly and needs to be updated.

Making it compatible with the latest OS release

In the ever-evolving digital space, the app needs to make compatible with upcoming devices and operating systems to function seamlessly while keeping up with the previous versions. That’s where app maintenance makes it happen to keep a tight grip on the customers. The efforts of ensuring the app to remain compatible costs around $100.

 Enhance marketing strategy

The app marketing extends the developed app’s reach to the target audience. The marketing campaigns launched before and after the app development are not enough to keep the app stay on top of users’ minds. Continuously upgrading the marketing strategies augment user engagement with the app. The companies that facilitate app marketing under the app maintenance umbrella pay from $500 to $1000 depending on the app type and target audience.

Take security up a notch

App security is a cardinal aspect of mobile app maintenance that increases with the size of the app, number of users, privacy updates incorporated, modifications in third-party integrations, and functionality changes implemented consequently. The security tools and measures leveraged to make the app secure intensify the mobile app maintenance cost.

Analytics

Analytics is a key to identifying the various metrics related to app growth. It provides rich insights regarding the user interactions with the mobile apps such as traffic, average session time, tracking user behavior, and others.

The insights help in making a data-driven decision for the areas where maintenance is required. Analytics better help in knowing the results of scheduled maintenance. When paid tools are leveraged, the probability of getting accurate results for users’ preferences is higher which helps in making faster decisions.

How can you reduce the mobile app maintenance cost?

Right development approach selection

When the apps are developed for multiple platforms using different approaches, it impacts the cost required to develop and maintain the app. The native apps render better performance and rich functionalities as compared to cross-platform app development.

The facility comes at cost as businesses need to build native apps for multiple platforms separately. It means businesses need to spend bucks on maintaining the apps separately, which increase the maintenance cost. The hybrid app development selection makes the app maintenance cost-savvy as it eliminates the need to separately maintain the app.

Consider MVP approach

It’s better to test the waters rather than reinventing the wheel with full-fledged solution development. MVP development allows businesses to check the users’ feedback for app’s idea in place of loading the app with several functionalities and design elements. The MVP approach helps in building and maintaining the app at a reduced cost.

Step in with the latest trends

Keeping up the app latest UI design and advanced technologies at a regular intervals eliminate the need to update the app during app maintenance. It helps in getting rid of frequent app maintenance and thus, reduce the mobile app maintenance cost.

Conclusion
The recent app launch may have made your dream of millions of downloads come true, but you cannot ensure the same level of success as the weeks passes by. To make the app survive and thrive in the market, you need to innovate the app at a continuous pace. It’s possible with mobile app maintenance.

Mobile app maintenance is the game of app maintenance (ensuring zero bugs, no malicious attacks, and marketing strategies) and scalability (Upgrading features, improving the design, extending compatibility, and introducing the latest technology trends). It helps businesses get paid for the initial investment they made in app development.

The mobile app maintenance cost looks trivial in front of the benefits it brings to the businesses. If interested in keeping the app modernized and in sync with the target audience, get connected with mobile app development agencies that help you with maintenance services.