An Entrepreneur’s Guide To App Development – Part 3

Hope you enjoyed reading the part 2 of the Entrepreneur’s Guide To App Development. That guide was aimed at helping an app-owner understand the app development process and what they can do to find the right development partner for their app idea. In case, you haven’t read that guide, you can find it here.

In this part, the focus is more on what happens after the development viz. Post Development Support, Maintenance, and Scalability. After reading this guide, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about the future of your app and ensure that it goes on to achieve the success that you anticipated when its idea first lit up in your mind:

Support & Maintenance: Is It Worthwhile?

It’s a great moment when your app is finally built. Very few people are strong enough to pursue their ideas and the fact that you’re one of them should make you feel proud. So kudos for that! But before think about resting on your laurels, here’s a word of advice: things move at a lightning pace in the modern world. You could miss an opportunity in the blink of an eye. So no need to let your guard down right after you’ve done the hard bit.

Technically speaking, the journey of your app really only begins after it’s out in the market before your target audience. That is your app’s acid test and the next few months will show the results of that.

Think all you need to do is just play the waiting game? Not quite. As your app finds its way to the end user, countless types of data get generated, giving you an insight into what’s encouraging and what needs looking into.

Once the data is available, you can use it to improve your app further. And that’s where Post App Development Support & Maintenance come in. It’s all good to have your first 1000 users and app installs. But how can you ensure those users will stay with you for a long time? Listen to what the users have to say, implement changes, fix the bugs and glitches, offer more engaging content and constantly improve the app. For that, you need to place your app in the hands of a trustworthy and reliable mobile app development company.

It’s quite obvious that all the top-grade apps are frequently updated to cater to the needs of the end-users, so if you have any thoughts about going without support and maintenance, you need to cast them out. You will get a few users of course, but if you want to stay in the game, convert those first 1000 into 10K and beyond then your focus should be on continuous app-improvement.

Now that we’ve established that app support and maintenance is not an option but a necessity we can consider the ‘cost question’. The answer lies in how the app was originally built. Some entrepreneurs wouldn’t think about app scaling, more on that later, and have the app built by a cheap developer. In that case, if your plans change later on as you start getting more user-engagement, the app optimisation costs will go higher. That’s because it costs more to upgrade an app that’s not designed to allow for scaling.

However, if you’d done your homework with consideration for scaling from the start, the support and maintenance costs will reasonably go down. 20% of the total app cost is a good rule of thumb. So, if you were going to spend $100k on app development, it’ll be sensible to set aside $10000 per year for its maintenance.

Following are some of the essential Support & Maintenance services you must look for in a package:

• Analysis & Diagnosis
• New Release & Updates
• Bug Fixing
• Server Hosting
• Security Audits

App Scalability: Can It Be An Afterthought?

Scalability is really like an insurance policy for your app. It ensures that if the demand for your services increases you have the necessary architecture in place to meet it.

Initially, your app is developed with a definite number of users in mind. In case your app performs really well on the market and gains rapid traction, you get an unprecedented influx of users. Now, that puts a lot of strain on the architecture and the result is decreased performance. As an app-owner, that should be your worst nightmare. You don’t want the users that you worked so hard to win turn away because your app could only house a limited number of them at a time.

Scalability is the answer to that predicament. A scalable mobile app has such a flexible architecture that can grow organically to meet the increasing user-demand. It also ensures that the most desirable user-experience level is achieved and maintained irrespective of the number of users.

Technology, as we all know, is never going backwards. It’s progressing and pushing past old barriers all the time. Your app idea that you invested in so wholeheartedly should not be stopped short of achieving its full potential because you didn’t make plans for its future. The mobile app market is saturated with apps of all kinds. There’s cut-throat competition to grab the limelight. What makes that even more complicated is how much attention each app gets. Word spreads like wildfire on the internet and that can easily seal the fate of your app one way or another.

A study recently found that 24% of users ditch an app after the first use. So, the attention span keeps shrinking. We see people being flooded with options. They know that if one app disappoints them, they have 100 more lined up to try out. The uninstall decision has just got a whole lot easier.

User-experience is a huge talking point in the mobile-app communities. People can spend hours on end trying to perfect one tiny aspect of their app. All to make the final version look immaculate and besides some other key factors is possible with app scalability. Scalability, therefore, should never be an afterthought.

After all, it’s a bad idea to throw a party only to find your guests short of space to enjoy it properly.

Cloud offers a convenient option to onboard the scalability bandwagon. You pay as per your needs and can expand just when you find things starting to look pretty aka more traffic.

Final Thoughts

So that concludes this 3rd and the final series of our Entrepreneur’s Guide To App Development. Hope you enjoyed reading them and gained all the wisdom we had to offer. If you’re an entrepreneur who’s just starting to get a feel for the mobile apps, then you’d enjoy our recent initiative – Entrepreneurship Guide. We’re constantly updating it with great content on the state of modern entrepreneurs, their biggest challenges and how they can ace their game without breaking a sweat. So, keep coming back for regular updates!