Frequently Update Smartphone Apps To Increase User Base

In the recent times smartphones have become integral part of almost every single household. Because of the product’s affordability, ease of use, excellent functioning and rich set of feature offerings it finds many takers. From middle class homemakers to taxi driver, a door to door salesman to the CEO of the largest organization, several class and varieties of people use smartphone these days. Most mobile application developers consider frequent updating of smartphone apps to engage all its users.

App Development That Lets You to Interface With Your Smartphones

Mobile Apps are the interface that lets you to carry out several tasks at your fingertips. Acting as an intermediary between the user and the device, they are built to serve specific purpose. An on-demand taxi app for example lets you to book a call cab to drop you at the destination.

Likewise the messaging app lets you to share text, audio and visual elements with people in social media. An m-commerce app lets you to online order a product of your choice. Then there are apps for gaming, music & video, car repair, carpet cleaning, browsing, storage cleaning and several more.

How Often Should you Update Smartphone Apps?

To keep in sync with the device hardware changes, technological upcomings, latest market offerings and customer needs – mobile applications need to be updated on a regular basis. There are no standard measurement as to how frequently an app needs to be updated. Several key factors play role in deciding frequency of app updation. Like the type and complexity of app, number of user base, platform developed, number of bugs to fix, user feedback et.al.

As a rule of thumb an app should be updated at least twelve times a year or between one to four updates in a month. As per the recent stat-update in the year 2013-14, all the mobile applications with less than nine updates got a below average rating. Trends also indicated that apps with highest updates(above 25 annual updates) received the maximum ratings.

Important Stats Consideration for Application Updates

In 2013, on the sample data collected the average cumulative rating for mobile application update was 2.8. The sample data also highlighted that, throughout 2014 major app players updated their respective apps between 20-25 times and earned highest average ratings. Infact YouTube app with more than 10 update in the year didn’t make up enough to stay in the rating race.

Major vs Minor App Updates

Most app updates fall into either major or the minor update. Often after the deployment of the app in the app store, the application is downloaded and used by users from different corners of the world. Despite of all pre-release testing, at times some minor or major bugs prop up.

Additionally upon an experienced user’s feedback, some features of the apps are also required to be tweaked or given a makeover. Depending on the kind and complexity of bugs and the feature change requests, an update is categorized into either a major or a minor app update.

An app development expert opines that most feature updates should be scoped once in a fortnight. However it all depends on the app delivery manager criterion as to when the next application update needed to be scheduled.

All the major app updates are first enlisted and if the changed request go beyond a prescribed minimum range the update must be scheduled. The changed request limits could be set to minimum of one for major bugs/feature updates and between three to five for minor bugs/feature updates.

OS Changes And the Extension Updates

Another major application update happens when the mobile OS like Android or iOS are overhauled or upgraded with additional features. Usually major updates like these are carried out after getting a formal approval from the smartphone user.

Usually permit is obtained from the smartphone user through a pop up call to action notification. The message may read something like – “Your mobile operating system is about to be upgraded to latest version of Android-N. Do you want to continue with the update?”

Likewise certain apps like Twitter or Facebook require features of external APIs and other libraries within the app. These third party extensions are again a major application upgrade. Only when these applications are updated they would be able to utilize the features of the embedded APIs or the libraries to the maximum.

Some Best Practices on Smartphone App Updates

Usually an app update is scheduled on the basis of time or the  density count of bugs/feature updates.  In fact the app support team could also include minor bug fixing updates with longer feature releases.

The mobile application support team could also proactively plan 2-4 updates in advance for the next release. However it is imperative that the planned release are attuned to the app’s current demand in the market. An app updating best practice also hints on updating of app screen shots, metadata et.al.  It allows them to keep pace with similar other apps in the market.

App Updates Roadmap and Release Schedule

Any bug fix or feature update request require change either at design, code or build stage. After the thorough analysis of the change request, the delivery manager assigns it to the concerned team at appropriate stage.

Once the bugs are resolved or features are upgraded, the quality team takes over. They analyze the change incorporation and its overall effect on the application. After the complete analysis, the next release is scheduled awaiting the user’s feedback.

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