Many businesses require mobile apps. And these apps go through the life cycle that involves numerous updates. While popular mobile apps should be updated regularly, applications that haven’t been successful at capturing the focus of a large audience can easily make do with monthly updates. The process of mobile app update is a challenging one. Fixing bugs, making changes in design, checking application functionality, updating codes- these are tasks that require both time and dedication. Businesses and application developers, specifically, should give due thought to application updates. Here we will try to answer the greater question that is, how to approach application updates?
Also know- 7 Signs that indicate your mobile app needs a major update.
1. Is frequency important?
The frequency at which you update your application is really important. Regular updates of your application will help both your team and also users. A well-performing application must be updated at least once per week. If you already have a lot on your platter and can’t squeeze an application update, you should update the application at least once every month. There are different parameters businesses must remember while they are experiencing this process. If you have a business that is influenced by seasonal changes, your application must update the changes according to this. Thus, before starting with the process of an application update, businesses must ensure that they have enough content to give their users. Most businesses don’t think more about content. Great content increases both engagement and retention. If you wish to make your application effective, you should discover new approaches to make your application more interesting and user-friendly.
2. Should you work out a balance?
It is important for businesses to work out a balance between smaller and larger updates. App updates are frequently driven by feature releases. Businesses may decide to do an application update when they either have a huge update or a smaller one. Larger updates are difficult to deal with. Sometimes, these may even involve a long time of work. In such a case, the question is- how should businesses achieve a balance?
The appropriate answer is simple- try to fit in features that can be accommodated in a two-week development cycle. Features that take around two weeks of development really take about a month to go live. This is basically because the process of application updates does not only include development but also testing. But, in some cases, businesses may feel compelled to induce features that are very complex. When this occurs, businesses can handle the current issue by first doing smaller updates and planning for the bigger one in advance. While some application developers are working on the smaller update, businesses should allocate more resources to the larger update. This way, an application update would undergo two releases- first one, a smaller one followed by the larger one for which work has been going on for months.
3. Understanding release cycles is important-
Each mobile app experiences various types of release cycles. Businesses can get a great benefit by understanding these release cycles. After an application release, the primary update should focus exclusively on fixing bugs. Despite the fact that you have dedicated hours to testing the application, it is quite likely that there will be certain bugs that bypassed your scanner system. By making bug fixing the motivation of their first update, businesses can make their applications more user-friendly. This will also increase your application store ratings.
The next release should also focus on fixing bugs and making your application look refined and easy to use. The thought is to do application updates that don’t require complicated tasks and hence, can be done at a short interval of time. Once your mobile app has become popular, reviews and feedback will start to drop in through different channels, for example, social media, application store, and so on. The release that an application developer makes now would rely on the kind of feedback got from users. It would include working on a design, fixing bugs, releasing new features, and so on. From here on, businesses must start to achieve a balance among smaller and larger updates.
4. Keep the competition in mind-
While it is a good idea to make a schedule and mechanism about how you need to do things, it is also important to be aware of your competition. As a business, you should see the kind of changes your competitors are coming up with and try to make your own mobile app better than everyone else’s. Try to compete with the very best- let your benchmarks be the individuals who are already at the highest point of their game. This won’t be simple.
As your application grows older and as the frequency and complexity of updates increases, you may want to hire more resources. This would include hiring more product managers, quality assurance experts, designers and developers. But, the significant thing to keep in mind is- don’t do bad updates due to pressure. Now, when users have become tech experts, businesses have more to lose because of a bad update than a late update. You can hire app developers of the solace team to develop app with trendy features.
5. Your app update should target your user base-
If you need your application to progress admirably, you should do application updates that focus on your core market and user base. Your development technique should align with the market expectation of the industry in which you work. For eg., users who use mobile app prefer their applications to be updated on a regular basis. On the contrary, enterprise marketing applications shouldn’t be updated so regularly. Take a general direction to what your users are saying about your application, what they need and what they look for from a decent application and attempt to give them simply that.