The life path of your app after its development
You have chosen DuckMa to help you create your mobile application. Now that your app has already been designed, developed and published, you are excited and can’t wait to see the results. You are convinced that the entire app development process that got you here is over, but you are wrong.
The development phase is over, that’s true, but your app still needs assistance in order to continue working and doing its best. It requires the sort of continuous care that, here at DuckMa, is called ongoing assistance.
Let’s take a look at what we mean when we are talking about your app’s ongoing assistance, so that we can better understand what it does and what it is.
Calling ongoing assistance helpful would be an understatement, because it is, in fact, necessary to guarantee the best long-term functioning of your app. You probably have often heard about apps failing. What you may not know yet is that one of the main reasons why apps fail to begin with is a lack of follow-up assistance, or, in this case, ongoing assistance.
“How can that be? – you may ask yourself – I have an app that has been properly developed and I can see it with my own eyes that it is working well. What could be missing?” Your app most likely doesn’t need anything else right after it has been launched. But it is also just as likely that if it does not have ongoing assistance, it will not be long before several problems start creeping up. But what are these problems? One example would be that ongoing assistance is crucial for the mobile application to continue working correctly on all devices, keeping up with the technological developments.
As we’ve said and repeated many times in previous articles, a mobile application is a software, and as such it requires assistance. Just think about the other software your business may be using, whether they are project management software or any other kind: they will need periodical reviews, and then they will still need to be updated regularly. The same thing goes for all of your other software: assistance and updating are intrinsic parts of their life cycle, therefore we are talking about a fundamental procedure. The reason for this is the following. A software, just like an app, whether we like it or not, has to deal with changing variables just after a few months of its launch, these variables will then impact its functioning and its performance. Let’s look at some examples.
• Hardware: There’s almost no need to mention this, since it’s always under the spotlight. Nowadays, new mobile devices with new features are constantly being put on the market. Obsolete apps could have some issues on these new devices.
• Operative Systems: iOS and Android are operating systems that are regularly updated. Therefore, apps need to be updated as well in order to be compatible with the most recent version of each operating system.
These are the main variables that require ongoing quality assistance in order to guarantee the best app performance at all times. If this weren’t the case, the initial investment would be rendered useless.
You may be asking yourself how much app assistance costs. The answer, as always, is “It depends”, also because the market behaves in different ways.
Some mobile app developers ask for an annual fee for the maintenance of the app. This is an added cost to the development fee and the launch of the app itself.
The market average – and we are basing this on what we see every day – may surprise the client due to its fairly quick development time and low costs. Where’s the catch? Often times, this means developing the app quickly (and poorly) in order to hand the product to the client and get paid just as quickly. This fee – which depends on the development – is usually about 10 to 20% of the final cost: this means that about 80 to 90% of what you will need to spend for your app will be devoted to the assistance. In such cases especially, updating will be particularly expensive because it will have to make up for what was skipped over in the development phase. In order to avoid letting ongoing assistance weigh so much upon our clients’ investments, here at DuckMa we have created our very own method: you will find it in the next scenario!
Here at DuckMa we limit maintenance costs, i.e. the costs for our ongoing assistance, to 10% of total development cost. How? Over the years, we have created a superior development process, and we are not just talking the talk!
In practical terms, we focus a lot on the development phase and we carry it through in the best way possible, so as to avoid having to come back to complete things that were not done during the creation of the app. This is why the initial cost is often higher than that of some of the other competitors, but it guarantees a lot more benefits for the client and for the entire app’s lifespan.
Delivering a technically impeccable product allows us to take on the subsequent assistance needed for a purely symbolic percentage of its cost, the previously mentioned 10%.
Over the years, after having developed the experience that sets us apart from others, we have set up an assistance process that is time-tested and well-defined, based on a methodology that has been consolidated and validated over time.
What we mean by ongoing assistance for a mobile app, is everything that is involved in making sure that your app is constantly updated and that it therefore continues to work perfectly on every device and every operating system.
One thing that must not be overlooked is the App Store ranking: regular and ongoing assistance helps your app shine in the eyes of Apple and Google, which perceive your app as being reactive and consistently improving for your users.
DuckMa can provide you with all this at a price that is inferior to the market average thanks to a well-functioning process that has been developed over many years. It guarantees both you and us that the app will work at its best for as long as possible, while simultaneously ensuring a return on the investment you made when you decided to create your mobile application.