How Often Should You Update Your Mobile App? Part 2 of 3


In part 2 of our series How Often Should You Update Your Mobile App, the development team at Echo shares two key areas that will help businesses optimize their time and money when dealing in the mobile marketplace.

see-art-orlando-main-screensUser Opinions and Feedback

If you listen, users will often tell you EXACTLY what is wrong or missing from your app. The trick is having the tools and resources in place to take in feedback and monitor reviews. This can be accomplished in many ways.

Analytics are a powerful way to see who is using your app and how they are using it. You can see things like most used features to the path users take to get to a certain section of your app. Most of these tools are free but take a little bit of time to get set-up and to be useful, you’ll need someone looking and interpreting the data that’s coming in. At Echo, we primarily use Google Analytics for mobile. It’s a robust platform that many people are already used to from seeing website analytics reports.

App reviews also tend to be the first place users turn when they have a complaint, even more so than when they are happy. If you monitor the app store reviews, you’ll often get feedback from users experiencing issues with your app. It’s also a great place to see where some users praise features that shine.

Focus groups, surveys and feedback forms are great ways to capture and organize opinions and suggestions for your app. This will give users a chance to voice how they feel and sometimes even give you ideas your internal team might not have thought about.

Software Architecture Changes

Operating System Updates – All platforms including Android, iOS and Windows update their mobile software and its out of the hands of developers to control the timing of this. If you have a mobile app on any of these operating systems, you’ll be responsible for keeping your mobile app running through Major and Minor software updates to the operating system. All of the major operating systems give developers early access to a Beta version of the these software updates for testing. You’ll need a team on hand prior to these releases to build, test and debug issues in time for the public release.

Backend Updates – Does your mobile app connect to a cloud system or a backend content system? If so, chances are that systems will need to undergo periodic updates or changes that will affect how your mobile app works. Having a schedule for these backend updates will dictate time and frequency for updating your mobile app.

Integrated and Peripheral Hardware – Have you heard of the Internet of Things? More and more everyday hardware and devices are able to connect to our mobile phones and mobile apps. Whether it’s controlling your lights in your house via wifi or taking data in from a device using Bluetooth, the amount of connected hardware is growing every day. If your app communicates or interface with hardware, you’ll have to keep it up to date as hardware and communication protocols change.

The final article in this series will address key areas such as new hardware and marketing campaigns that will help you and your company make important decisions on how often to update your app.