How Much Does It Cost To Maintain An App In 2023?

Businesses are expanding and emerging with their mobile apps across different industries. 

As of 2023, there are 1.96 million apps available for download from the Apple App Store, while 2.87 million apps are available for download on the Google Play Store. 

The following data highlight the notable trend of businesses using mobile apps. Therefore, offering an enhanced app experience becomes crucial to remain competitive in the app market.

A robust application requires long-term maintenance to deliver a better user experience. By identifying and fixing any bugs along with offering new features on regular updates, businesses can improve their platform experience. 

App maintenance can help entrepreneurs to improve and scale their apps and get more app downloads in addition to retaining existing app users. Also, not investing in maintenance and scalability can result in app failures and dreaded app uninstalls. 

However, the investment required to maintain an app is among the most asked concern among entrepreneurs and app owners. In this article, explore the factors that can help you estimate the cost required to maintain an app.

Why Is App Maintenance Important?

In 2016, Apple removed 50K apps from the App Store because they were obsolete. Maintaining your app regularly will keep its usability and worthiness over time; with technology advancing faster, more and more businesses are entering the mobile app industry. Thus keeping your app competitive with new features and functionality becomes crucial.

However, many reasons highlight the importance of maintaining the app. 

1. Minimizes uninstalls

Apps with frequent bugs and crashes prevent users from experiencing enhanced experiences on digital platforms. Moreover, apps without constant updates, new features, and functionalities make users shift to other apps.

As per a report by Statista, 70% of users remove an app from their smartphones after 90 days of installation. 

Moreover, updating apps regularly helps increase your app retention rate, as every app owner should consider prioritizing the enhanced platform experiences for their active users.

2. Helps stay ahead of the competition

There are millions of apps trying to gain users’ attention by offering them up-to-date and latest features. Regularly maintaining and scaling your app is a way to beat your competition and stand out.

3. Ensures safety from cyber attacks

With the constant trend of utilizing apps across different purposes, hackers continuously search for loopholes and find new ways to steal data and personal information from a wide range of apps. 

Updating the app regularly will help you improve the security of your app and will enable you to identify and fix various security loopholes throughout the app.

4. Delivers better user experiences

Everyone wants to deliver the best platform experience to their app users instead of just wanting them to download their app. A better platform experience helps app owners to develop a long-term relationship which results in app success and growth.

You can monitor your app to understand how your user feel when using your app with the help of analytical tools. By keeping track of user behaviors, you can improve your app by implementing new features and eliminating every possible challenge that users are facing while using your app.

5. Increases ROI 

Updating and maintaining the app results in a great ROI in the long run, thus helping businesses to decrease the cost of acquiring new users. 

Moreover, there is a high possibility that you may encounter bugs at regular intervals throughout the app. Therefore monitoring your app and fixing those bugs over a long period becomes essential.

Types Of App Maintenance Services

Maintaining an application is a continuous process of updating and re-evaluating them to scale your business and maximize profitability. Anyone seeking to keep their businesses ahead of the competition must improve their applications which can be done via app maintenance services.

Partnering with a reliable app development company is the best way to improve your application even further, as they can help you add new features, fix bugs, and add new features based on users’ feedback. 

The company will suggest the right app maintenance services based on your project needs and requirements. However, the different kinds of app maintenance services are mentioned below.

1. Emergency maintenance

The process refers to addressing critical issues and problems in an application that requires immediate actions and resolutions. This kind of maintenance typically involves the development team’s actions to address the issues and fix them as soon as possible.

2. Adaptive maintenance

This maintenance refers to software maintenance that aims to adapt to changes based on operating environments, such as software and hardware upgrades, regulatory requirements, or business process modifications. 

Adaptive maintenance is the best way to ensure the app will remain functional and compatible by adopting the changing environment helps apps avoid becoming outdated.

3. Preventive maintenance

Under preventive maintenance, the developer aims to reduce app complexity and improve their maintainability factors through code restructuring, code optimization, and updation of documents. 

Moreover, preventive maintenance helps app owners to improve system reliability, minimize downtime, and extend the lifespan of software or hardware.

4.  Perfective maintenance

A kind of software maintenance that focuses on improving or enhancing the performance, functionality, or user experience of an existing software application. 

The developers perform functional modifications in the source code based on feedback collected from their app users. Perfective maintenance consists of key aspects such as feature enhancements, performance optimization, improving usability, security enhancements, etc. 

5. Corrective maintenance

This approach refers to resolving and addressing defects, issues, and bugs in mobile apps and software. Corrective maintenance involves identifying, rectifying, and analyzing problems that occur in software after its deployment.

Moreover, the primary goal of corrective maintenance is to restore software functionality and eliminate any unexpected or incorrect behavior.

What Factors Affect The Cost Of App Maintenance?

Multiple factors influence the cost of app maintenance, such as app updates, fixing bugs, location of the development team, hosting, etc. 

Here are a few more factors that can help you estimate the cost of updating your app.

1. Bug fixing and updates

Upgrading your app with new features or eliminating a few bugs is one of the most essential elements defining the cost of updating your app.

Conversely, the cost of updating your app depends on several factors, such as the complexity of developing and implementing new features. Consult with a professional app development company where experts can help you with regular checking on your app and can update them when needed at nominal charges. 

2. Analytics

App crashes and mobile app glitches can be easily identified with the help of analytical tools such as Google Analytics. The analytical tools provide insight into your apps, such as app screens with most crashes.

Plenty of free analytical tools can help you identify bugs and glitches in your app. However, you can also go for the paid version that provides more detailed insights about the app regarding app crashes, glitches, technical issues, etc.

3. Development team location

The location of the app development team is another factor that can influence the cost of updating your app. For example, the app development team from the Western part charges more than app developers from the Asian region. 

4. Customer support

Offering customer support is a great way to enhance the platform experience for your businesses. However, you would need to employ a few members to facilitate customer support for handling the complex queries of your app users.

The cost of customer support will vary depending on the nature of services provided and number of people employed. Integrating a chatbot into your app is the best way to handle basic queries, which can help you minimize the dependence on human effort for offering customer support to your users.

5. Third-party services

Integrating third-party services is the best way to extend your app’s services, features, and functionalities. However, most third parties have service charges you must pay for using their services on your app. 

For example, many food delivery apps use third-party services regarding payment gateways, maps, or other services to enhance the functionalities of their app. Therefore, when you decide to implement features of third-party services, the possible involved fee must be considered. 

6. App marketing aspect

Anyone seeking to succeed with their app should invest in marketing strategies. App marketing is the best way to introduce your app to your customers and drive engagement and downloads to your app.

Various factors can determine the cost of maintaining your app, such as the budget for the paid campaign, marketing tools prices, etc.

7. Hosting maintenance

Apps need hosting for various purposes, such as maintaining their data on servers, offering live customer support, maintaining e-commerce functionality, etc. 

The hosting server cost depends on the basic usage of your app, such as content, number of active users, and projected growth. However, partnering with a reliable app development company is the best way to determine the investment required for your app hosting.

How To Reduce App Maintenance Costs?

The price of maintaining an app might vary depending on several factors. However, developers may utilize the given tips to reduce the costs associated with app maintenance.

1. Invest in the right app development platform.

Native vs. hybrid app development are the two basic app creation approaches. 

Native apps are platform-specific, so you must have developed apps across multiple platforms separately, such as iOS, Android, or Windows. On the other side, hybrid apps are cross-platforms, which means developers can deploy the same app across different platforms with some optimization required. 

Opting for hybrid app development is a great way to minimize the app development budget and the future cost required to maintain an app.

2. Focus on building MVP first

The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) refers to the app with only basic features. Developing an MVP with only the necessary features for your app users is advisable. Offering unnecessary features can increase the cost of app development and maintenance.

Based on the users’ feedback, you can add more valuable features to enhance the platform experience or observe your competitors and the marketing trends for upgrading your app. Hire a reliable app development agency that can bring your app concept to life for a successful MVP development. 

3. Discuss strategy with the app development partner

Working with an experienced app development company can help you strategize your app development and maintenance. 

The company can also help you plan your budget for making informed decisions regarding maintenance, upgrading your app with new features, and resolving existing bugs.

Conclusion

After spending all the hard work, time, and money on building an app, no one would want it to go outdated within a few months.

Therefore, app maintenance should be considered when budgeting for app development. The app maintenance also covers routine tasks such as security updates, bug fixing, performance optimization, and enhancing app compatibility across various devices. 

This is where we come in. At Idea Usher, we are not just limited to creating innovative apps but also provide app maintenance through which businesses can effectively scale and upgrade their app.

Our team of highly experienced professional developers will keep checking on your app’s performance, market trends, user habits, and the latest technology to offer regular and relevant updates, which can result in the profitability of your application in the long term.

Contact us today if you want reliable app maintenance services or want to scale your app to the next level by leveraging the proficiency of our app development experts. Our experts will help you improve your product by offering the best app development and maintenance services.

Contact Idea Usher 

Email:

[email protected]

Phone:

(+1)732 962 4560

(+91)859 140 7140

FAQ

Q. How much does it cost to maintain an app?

A. The cost to maintain an app depends on various factors such as bug fixing and updates, development team location, third-party services, marketing aspects, hosting maintenance charges, etc. 

Q. What is needed to maintain an app?

A. The app maintenance needs to focus on several factors such as annual app audit and compatibility updates, new features and enhancements, design updates, performance monitoring, security updates, and code maintenance. 

Q. Why do applications need maintenance?

A. The app maintenance helps businesses to stay competitive in the market by ensuring superiority in their performance and making them free from any glitches and bugs throughout the app.