How to set up a solid maintenance strategy for your mobile application?

You've launched your product and now what?

Congratulations, your product is in production and ready to revolutionize the world, but is this the end of your project and your collaboration with your digital partner? A big NO: this is just the beginning of the journey, and with that in mind, most companies will offer you a support contract. But it's important to know what you need: corrective, predictive or evolutionary maintenance? Do you know how you are going to manage and anticipate changes and new ideas?

At Atipik we offer a first phase in all our contracts, which we call Hypercare. During this phase, which takes place right after delivery, our teams remain dedicated to your product and monitor its behavior in order to proactively address any issues that may arise.

The different types of maintenance

Corrective maintenance, but why?

This type of maintenance covers any type of bugs or technical problems encountered by a user while browsing your app or website.

Your product has a warranty period, however, once this period is over it is always possible to face issues. A good maintenance contract must include a notion of corrective maintenance. This will define the conditions under which the issues will be corrected (in how much time, the treatment processes, the possible blocking levels, etc.).

What is the purpose of predictive maintenance?

Predictive maintenance focuses on correcting bugs or anomalies before they appear. Compared to corrective maintenance, it requires greater involvement and monitoring by the development team.

Unlike its name suggests, predictive maintenance does not predict bugs (we have not yet managed to travel into the future, but we are working on it, we promise!). The goal of this type of maintenance is to predict and anticipate changes that could impact the environment of your product in order to analyze and correct potential problems that can be generated. For example, over the long term, it is possible that the performance of a database becomes weaker due to the large amount of data that has been generated since the launch of your system. We will therefore continuously analyze the performance and intervene at the right time to optimize and adapt your product so that your users don't notice a thing.

Evolutionary maintenance

The last one, the evolutionary maintenance, aims at making your product evolve. This type of maintenance is not used to fix bugs, but it allows you to slowly and continuously improve your application.

In most cases, you will be offered a contract, often with a defined number of days, which will be used for small evolution requests (update your General Conditions, display a data in a different way,...). This avoids each time, for minor modifications, to have to ask your provider to make you an offer, a budget, to have to exchange, sign, etc. Everyone saves time and your app continues to evolve over the long term.

What are the advantages of ensuring the maintenance of your app or your site

Your mobile app or website is intended to be sustainable in the medium, long-term and a good maintenance will allow you to ensure a high level of satisfaction by offering your users a high quality mobile app, working and supporting the latest technology. By having a well-organized maintenance from the beginning of your project, you save money on the long term, you don't accumulate bugs, you make your product evolve as you go along and your teams are more efficient by intervening in a continuous way. Doing a global project of improvement and corrections once a year has a higher cost in most cases and it does not allow you to ensure a constant quality for your application or your site.

First of all, the goal is to ensure that your mobile or web application works in the long run! A product that is stable will provide your users with a better experience and therefore a higher level of satisfaction. If you don't take care of your app, you are likely to see your uninstallation rate skyrocket.