5 Things to Consider While Searching for an App Maintenance Partner

5 THINGS TO CONSIDER WHILE SEARCHING FOR AN APP MAINTENANCE PARTNER

If your brand hosts an app, you know that app maintenance is a high priority for business owners. Convenience and ease set the tone with any audience, so your app needs to be supported by a partner that can deliver the best on all accounts. When sifting through an abundance of different options, consider these business components to help guide your decision making process.

First and foremost, does the app maintenance partner you’re contemplating offer variation? App maintenance often requires attention and support to a variety of issues, so you’ll want to align yourself with an option that caters to your umbrella of different needs. Today’s apps most commonly need maintenance in way of corrective, preventative, adaptive, or perfective support, but, again, these needs happen to evolve quickly. Thus, having a partner who has a breadth of solutions for helping your needs as they arise is arguably a smart move.

Second, what does this app maintenance partner offer in way of usage of metrics to calculate app performance? You’ll need to acquire a significant number of downloads to define acquisition metrics. Engagement metrics requires a growing number of active users, insight reflecting the estimated length of session, and an audience that demonstrates consistent loyalty. Retention metrics embody the challenge of continuously engaging users to generate an impressive retention rate, in addition to your life time value. Quality metrics demands the traditional attentiveness to technical issues, programming automatic crash reports, manually acquiring user feedback and cultivating a library of app reviews. And last but not least, behavioral metrics draw conclusions from users’ behavior—including device type, geographic location, frequency, usage time and actions—to provide insights for forthcoming updates. Can the parter your considering offer all these different types of metrics?

The security component of app maintenance and support is a prominent one. Depending on the category of your app, you’ll need different capabilities in way of security technologies, especially if your app includes monetary transactions. Can your app maintenance supporter deliver expertise on app security features, functionality and multi-platform solutions? If you’re going to outsource a partner and trust them with sensitive consumer data, the security piece of the puzzle is a non-negotiable.

Location of your partner also translates as something worth considering. Perhaps you’re leaning towards an maintenance support team that’s local and familiar with your demography, target audience consumer trends, business environment, cultural parallels, and basic geography. There are undoubtedly pros to this, but there are also pros to selecting an offshore alternative. These advantages include cost reductions, access to app maintenance developers with seasoned skill sets, and exposure to a team that’s larger in size, and thus more robust.

The last thing to consider is cost. Traditionally, cost of app maintenance is informed by assessing the volume of time and resources needed to complete a task, and yes, this does include the magnitude of human resource consumption. Given that mobile platforms operate individually and differ in numbers and basic processing tendencies, the platform used to develop your app also plays a role in determining what type of support capabilities you’ll need.

These five things will be imperative in guiding your search process. If you’re in need of app maintenance, check out RDIA’s capabilities as we have a variety of support systems in place to help your app perform to the best of its ability.