Application support

You have an excellent mobile application, which is the result of many months of work by designers, programmers and testers. It has already taken its place in the Play Market and App Store, and the first downloads have begun. It would seem that the development is over and you can focus on making a profit. But if you want your application to be constantly relevant and in demand among customers, it needs to be constantly developed.

Development or support of a mobile application includes:

• Regular release of updates.

• Software stabilization.
• Continuous work on improvements.
• Correction of errors discovered during real-world use of the product.

This should be taken extremely seriously, otherwise the company could very quickly face problems with customer service, financial and reputational losses.

Application owners often underestimate the importance of technical support simply because they do not understand its importance in growing their business. Therefore, we suggest considering the main benefits that you can get if you receive competent technical support for your product:

• Increased ROI. According to statistics, applications that are updated regularly and in a timely manner better meet user expectations. This has a positive effect on the number of successful transactions, and therefore increases the return on investment.
• Increased user engagement. A supported app has far fewer bugs, runs smoothly, and provides a positive user experience to customers. And the happier customers are, the more often they perform the target action and the less often they delete the application from their devices.

• Increasing app rating. If the application works stably, helps users actually solve their problems and does not contain annoying bugs, it quickly earns money from positive reviews. This will increase your position in organic search results in stores and increase the number of downloads.
• Improving relationships with clients. A comfortable and convenient application will help you build stronger and longer relationships with clients, and will also help you attract new ones.

Mobile application technical support is a general concept. If you dig a little deeper, it includes several different types of work performed by developers. Let’s consider the main ones:

• Emergency support. It is necessary in cases where a critical failure has occurred in the application, making it impossible to further use the product or part of the main functionality. Most often, such errors arise unexpectedly, in the most unpredictable places, and require immediate response from developers. After fixing such a bug, general testing of the project is performed. This allows you to make sure that the situation has truly stabilized and the error did not affect the operation of other functions.
• Preventive support. It is not necessary to wait for the entire service to “crash”, and to avoid it you need to regularly test the application, identify potential problems and correct them in a timely manner. It is important that bugs can be contained not only in the code, but also in the design or logic of the product.

• Adaptation support. The digital world is changing rapidly, and technology solutions that seem fresh and innovative today may become a relic of the past tomorrow. For successful business development, it is important to follow current trends. This applies not only to mobile applications, but also to other software solutions.
• Improving the application. After the mobile application is released, you will start receiving feedback from customers. As a result, it may turn out that some of the hypotheses incorporated into the service during development turned out to be incorrect, and the real needs of the audience are very different. By examining such feedback, you can make appropriate corrections to the product and work to improve the user experience.

During technical support of a mobile application, developers can perform a wide variety of types of work. Some of them bring unobvious results to businesses, which is why companies often refuse to invest in them. At the same time, the significance of such work in the development of a digital product is simply enormous. Let’s look at the main ones.

Tracking Application Behavior

One of the top priorities of any application is end user satisfaction. Therefore, when developing a product, it is important to track the following indicators:

• Download speed.
• Number of installations and uninstalls.
• Error rate.
• Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short.

The first three metrics are quite obvious, but it’s better to dwell on the last one in more detail. The NPS indicator is the difference between the number of loyal and critical customers, and reflects how ready your application is for rapid distribution in stores. The higher the index, the cheaper the cost of installation and sale will be.

To monitor and manage the NPS index, you need to regularly conduct surveys of your audience, and based on the results obtained, take appropriate actions – not only technically, but also in management terms.

Tracking features that are missing in the product

To meet user needs in the long term, it is important to continuously improve the functionality and introduce new features into the application. To do this you need:

• Conduct surveys or in-depth interviews of users to identify their needs.
• Analyze reviews in stores.
• Monitor the market and analyze competitors’ ideas.
• Study customer feedback on social networks.

Design update

The app design forms the visual image of the brand, determines the first impression and inspires user trust. However, design trends change very quickly, and what inspired your audience yesterday may look outdated and uninteresting a week later. Therefore, it is worth updating the design constantly.

If we talk about our experience, we, at AVADA MEDIA, have created and released many mobile applications for a variety of business niches, and we continue to support most of them to this day.

In addition to our own developments, we can also use solutions created by other teams for support. In this case, our specialists will conduct an audit and provide a fresh perspective on the further development of your existing product.