After-Launch App Support: Goes and No-goes

Thanks to rising popularity of smartphones, tablets and worldwide mobile network almost every business is aiming to launch its own mobile app to satisfy and communicate with their existing and potential clients. The mobile applications market is rising with immense speed. This huge industry is getting bigger and bigger every day and it doesn’t seem likely that the trends will change soon. The army of mobile apps developers has grown massively; the amount of apps also beats every record imaginable. The income that the industry generates is huge; its perspectives are looking extremely bright.

First of all: it doesn’t take an army to build a masterpiece

A lot of people think that it’s really hard, almost impossible to launch their own smartphone app. Some believe that it’s only possible for big companies with tens and hundreds of developers and designers who spend multiple months creating their product. Of course, there are such big apps as for example games with complicated 3D-engines, which need big specialist crews to work on them. But there also are examples of applications that are popular, find themselves at the top of Google Play and AppStore charts, and are made by one man team. Such apps can get their creator lots of income if he does everything correctly.

You probably know that legendary Angry Birds game was made by a little Finnish company called Rovio, before that they spent several years trying to create something popular and weren’t exactly successful. Another example is Instagram app and service — it was made by two guys from California. Such examples inspire lone developers to create something new and unseen before, but the work doesn’t stop even after the app is developed and launched.

You’ve gone live – what’s your next step?

So, let’s imagine something: the all-important date is almost there, the app that’s been on your mind for the best part of last weeks, maybe even weeks, will be launched and your team can finally breath free. But wait with all the celebrations and champagne bottles, ask yourself: are you really ready to launch your app?

If you believe that your working strategy after launch will be less intensive, you are pretty much mistaken. Here lies the problem: a lot of sponsors are ready to give the needed budget for developing and launching the app, but some of them don’t even consider the long-term spending plan which is an absolute must if you want to maintain the popularity of your app.

For the app to start successfully, you should know all the insights of that.

On this market the continuous work of analytics is crucial. You should analyst everything: the amount of people that installed your app, market and rivals’ activity, the tempo of the other apps moving forward and so on.

Incredibly often the developers that launch the mobile apps don’t plan the future of their work at all. That’s wrong on basically all levels.

Below we’ll try to share some of the recommendations on how to maintain the popularity of your app after its launch with you.

One of the most effective ways to ensure your app will be able to keep its audience right after the moment you’ve launched it is to plan beforehand on how you’ll support it in the future. On the stage of app development you should already simultaneously be working on support plan which will be implemented after the launch. Planning the support of the app will basically be the key to establish your product in that exciting world of mobile applications.

The support of your app is to say the least as important for its success as the launch, if not even more important. Imagine that your app is your house: you need to love it and care about it; otherwise, it will become uncomfortable to live there and one day it will simply be inhabitable. That’s exactly what will happen to your app if you stop supporting it. Fixing the errors and bugs, updating it from time to time, improving the app — all of this will be needed to get users’ support and gain their loyalty.

All in all, users are appreciating even the smallest improvements, even the little win for you will show them that you care about the feedback, and you’ll be one step closer to make them believe it’ll stay this way later. After that, when you’ve built a stable plan of technical maintenance in the early stages of the process and set the timing of updates, you could spend your saved money on the improvement of the service for your happy clients.

Consistency is the key to success

To maintain the long-term success for your app you’ll need to invest in the current research projects, technical support, marketing and improvements. The main problem about your app at the early stages is that the fast gained popularity slowly fades away. The main mass of users stops using the app during first 30 days after they’ve installed it, 921 new apps launch every single day. Eventually, your app can disappear in the never-ending process of market demands being changed, and you’ll need to absolutely re-think it to keep your place in the charts.

 

So, the continuous investment in the marketing strategies and app support are the key to finding new and new improvements that can bring you more and more new users. Otherwise, all the energy and resources that you put into your app will give less feedback as the time goes by.

A lot of companies develop an app which spends like 3 months on the market before they understand that no one even uses it. If your app isn’t updated often enough and you don’t get any new content in, it’s more than possible that people will just delete it sooner rather than later. It’s important to fill the app with lots of new content and functions to make people believe that on the other side of an application there are people who care about them and their needs.

It’s incredibly important to make use of all the feedback you get during the whole lifetime of your app. For example, before the launch of the product the developers get the feedback from beta-testers. Moreover, it’d be very good to motivate users to not only rate the app but also give a quality feedback on what’s working fine, what’s not, what could work better, what would be great to add and so on.

When there’s enough of App Store ratings, you’ll need to analyze them and make conclusions about your work: where you’ve done well, where there’s an area to improve. It’s critical to react fast when it’s needed, and use people’s opinions to plan the further improvement of your app.

The developers should always be planning the future updates, improvements, and fixes.

Every little bit counts

Little changes will always be needed, so that’d be quite a wise step to invest your starting money into development. Maybe it’s better to release a more simple version of an app and get ready to make new patches, updates, and improvements over the next few months. Those easy tricks can make you spend a lot less money and time than if you’d need to absolutely re-do everything or even get rid of something because of critical errors or bugs.

Some of those tiny patches should be planned even before the app has been launched. You can wait a couple of weeks or months releasing your planned updates and improvements and observing the situation, before opening the way for additional functions, which will most likely complicate everything even more. After that, you can set your priorities on which improvements or bug fixes should be queued first.

Video games industry has been very successful in implementing such strategy and business model. If you plan DLCs and other new content long before its release, you’ll have enough time to see what problems do your users have while using the app and also to react to all the feedback you get. This will help you decide, what to fix first and what functions are wanted by the users the most.

The estimated cost of maintaining the app is about 15-20 percent of what it cost you to develop the app. So, if developing of your app costs $10 000, you should be ready to invest another $2 000 on the service works. It could look like a huge amount, but the biggest error of company’s CEO and his advisors would be to try to create ideal, bulletproof application from scratch at the first signs of trouble.

Make sure you stay in touch with the audience

The reality hits when you understand that whatever amount of popular right now functions you’ll include in the first build, you’ll get a lot of feedback (negative and positive) almost right after the launch. These users will pretty much decide if your app is successful, so the side developer can let the users choose what they want to see and adapt as soon as possible.

He sets up the contact with his users, starting with little simple bug fixes and adaptation to what the people want to see. A happy user of your end product is the objective that not only makes your app more comfortable to use but also cuts your short- and long-term spending.

There’s a lot of instruments available in the modern world, and using some of them you can ensure that your app will be well supported during its lifetime.

Frequently asked questions: special for the not-so-obvious processes going through the app launch, you need to set up the FAQ section. It’s a great way to reduce the number of questions that the users ask and of course make the life of your personal a little bit easier. Moreover, this way app support gets easy for both sides involved. If people will stop asking even just a couple of most frequent questions, your employees will feel a little bit more relaxed.

Feedback: The bigger your user base gets, the bigger is the chance that the human eye will miss a couple of requests from people or negative feedback hidden somewhere in the depth of user reviews. You can count on some instruments which will help you have all the feedback on your app in one place. That helps you maintain the highest level of service possible.

Live-chat: If you were lucky enough to get a really big audience, it gets more and more important to solve the people’s problems as quick as you can. The functionality of built-in live-chat can help you ensure that you get all the feedback as fast as possible — basically real-time. That’s kinda cool and shows that you and your app are in great form, but what’s critical here is to be ready to splash more money and people’s work into your app than ever, cause that function really is the one that takes a lot of work.

When your app is successfully launched, you risk getting under quite a lot of fire from unhappy users. One of the most important functions in every app store is the possibility to start a conversation with people who leave negative feedback. If you show the people that you’re not indifferent to what’s going on with your app, your company will quite fast earn a reputation of one that cares about users.

If you have a loyal audience, you can interact with those people during future marketing events, big launches and so on. It’s also great for your image to let people rate your app right inside of it, so that they don’t need to make any other steps.

The right use of all services and instruments available is the key to staying high in the ranks for a long time. There’s a lot of platforms and devices from which people can access your app. This variety can cause you serious problems right at the start, and said instruments help you track every crash and big that happened to your app, wherever it was.

Combining the facts that you already know and those stats, you can get the best results and easily set sights on problems that need to be solved for your app to function like it has to and be as stable as it gets. Developers, whose apps are really popular, work day and night to gain results like this. Investing, financially or not, in your app is crucial for its success, and the sooner you understand it and build the system that works perfectly, the better it is.

The first impression is important, the simplicity of the interface and guides is crucial and constant contact with your audience is as important as the first two combined. The main rule is to keep everything comfortable and simple, pretty much intuitive for people to use, but at the same time functional enough to be attractive for the people. Finding the happy medium is the task that could seem impossible, but it needs to be solved, and there are no alternatives to it if you want to keep your client satisfied.

And if you need any further help with supporting your app after it’s been launched, please feel free to contact us! Sometimes the help of qualified specialists is crucial, and that’s exactly what we can offer.