Importance of maintenance for website and applications

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It is no surprise that with the popularity of smartphones and enhanced connectivity, it is extremely critical for nearly every business to ensure a presence on mobile platforms and invest in some type of app or website development to reach their present and prospective customers. Many business owners most often put a lot of efforts in setting up their website and products at the time of launch, but most often forget the importance of constantly maintaining and updating it with the changing technology, devices, and customer preferences.

With regular updates on Android and iOS, something that looks modern today can look dated in a year. About 90% of the developers would agree that 15-20% of the total budget spend of a software project should be allocated for its maintenance. For example, if you invested $250,000 for making the application, you should plan to invest at least $37,500 for its regular maintenance. This number might sound high at first, but just think about it like when you buy a house, you just don’t budget for the amount you spend to buy it, you always consider its maintenance cost. Similarly, businesses should plan the scheduled maintenance for bug fixing, updates, etc. to their applications and websites.

Another great benefit of regularly updating your application is that you can add features incrementally without going into an expensive rehauling of the application and lose customers while you execute on it. With each update to iOS and Android, new UI best practices, designs and features are added. Along with new phones with better screen resolutions and different screen sizes. A recent example is when Apple launched iPhone X, they added “the notch”, applications had to release an update to make use of the new screen real estate and look good on the new standard. The businesses who moved quickly were able to get featuring and have better user experiences compared to their competition.

One more thing that can impact your app maintenance (and development) budget is the platform you choose to make your app. If you choose to make it a native Android or Apple app, it will cost you double to make any updates since you will have to do the same work twice – once on each platform. On the other hand, if you used something like Ionic, updates can be easier since you can have the developers update the code once and that could be exported and published on Apple and Google app stores.