It can be highly frustrating to see an app’s short-lived success after investing a significant amount of time and money in ensuring its successful development and launch. Various factors are responsible for an app’s underperformance, and dealing with them post-launch becomes complicated. This is where app maintenance comes in very handy. This post will help you identify the causes behind the non-performance of your app and how you can fix them to ensure maximum productivity.
Challenges faced after the launch of an app
Developing an app brings along its own technical challenges, especially during implementation and post-launch. Being aware of the technical boundaries allows you to impose your application idea better and more professionally. Various reasons can affect your app’s functionality and popularity, even if an expert developed it.
Let’s look at some common challenges that app owners often face after the launch of a mobile app. We have also mentioned some proven solutions as suggested by our mobile app developers.
1. Establishing the right connection with the right audience
An app catering to uncategorized audiences will seldom get the desired traction. An app not designed for your target audience will be lost in the crowd without delivering results. So, how can you gain maximum traction for the launched app?
Solution: Use social media ads based on a well-researched market.
a) Use of Social Media:
People often access social media through mobile phones. Placing ads on different social media platforms increases the chances of your app’s installation to a great extent. Just keep in mind that each platform has a specific kind of audience. For instance, if you want to target youths, focus on Facebook; if your target is businesses, focus on LinkedIn and Instagram, and so on. Try considering both free and paid ad methods, which will undoubtedly help your app get the right audience within a short time.
b) Market research:
You must thoroughly evaluate the type of market you will enter with your app. If you have already researched the market and are still not finding enough users for the app, get into more specific niches. This analysis will also help you decide upon features that will be of better use to your target audience.
c) Demographics:
Prepare a demographic segmentation of your audience to classify them based on their characteristics. Categorize them based on age, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation, and income. Set the geographic limit (country, state, city) from where you want maximum traction.
d) Building user personas:
All the data gathered from your market research will help you build user personas. The more specific you are with this data, the better approach you will have in deciding your audience. It will help you understand their motivation and needs and tweak the app’s features and design accordingly.
2. App scalability issues
Your app must be capable of handling a growing number of users without compromising on quality and speed. Its infrastructure must be well-designed to support increasing requests per minute (RPM).
Solution: Active technical support
a) Dedicate a team for app performance monitoring:
Scalability issues can be unpredictable, may arise at any given time, and can appear for several reasons. If you want to keep such problems from impacting user experience on your mobile app, you will need a team that’s dedicated to monitoring app performance, identifying issues, and raising concerns or fixing them as soon as possible.
b) Choose app maintenance & support service provider:
When you choose a reputed and trusted web or app development company, they also provide regular maintenance and support to ensure smooth functionality and fix bugs and errors as and when they occur. Moreover, they know the types of resources used and the related bottleneck or latency. If you have a complex app, scaling becomes even more complicated, and you will need expert technical support services. They review the code, identify the defects, and rectify them from time to time to help the app maintain its worth and credibility.
3. Effective marketing
This is one of the most commonly faced challenges after launching an app. According to Statista, over 2.65 million apps are available on the Google Play store and over 2.18 million on the Apple Store. If you have not planned your marketing strategy well, your app may lose traction among myriads.
Solution: Enhanced focus on app store optimization (ASO) & content marketing strategy
a) App store optimization strategy:
Even if you have launched a brilliant app, but it has not been promoted appropriately, your app will have a low retention rate. By targeting relevant keywords, you can gain attention from the right type of users for your app and turn them into paying customers. This is where ASO can help.
Consider ASO as a long-term marketing plan to nurture consistent organic app traffic and downloads. Having a clear and robust ASO strategy will help your app gain maximum visibility with higher rankings on the app store. It becomes even more critical now since direct search is the most preferred way for users to explore new apps. However, to implement this, you will need an in-house team of SEO experts, or you can delegate app store optimization to an app or web development company.
b) A robust content marketing plan:
According to a SEMrush survey, 97% of respondents agreed that content marketing is a significant and influential tactic of their marketing strategy. However, content marketing for mobile is different; it requires a closer connection with the app’s visual interface, tangible hooks to maintain user retention, and an unwavering focus on value.
Offering relevant content regarding your products/services via the app is an effective way to attract visitors and also helps in addressing customer concerns and answering their queries. It helps you develop good relations with the target audience and generate leads organically. Delivering high-quality and engaging content for your app significantly impacts the audience’s decision-making, along with enhanced SERP rankings.
4. Frequent market changes
The only sure thing about the market is that it keeps changing. This may be due to technological innovations, increased competition, changes in consumer tastes, or other reasons. It would help if you were prepared for the uncertainties your product or app can face in the future.
Solution: Keep improving the app & be responsive
a) Offer responsive customer support:
The kind of customer support you offer to your app users directly impacts adapting to the changing market conditions. It might seem unmanageable to take care of thousands of users on your app, but this is where the difference lies. Offering responsive customer support service will help you retain customers and know their experiences with your app. This gives you a clear idea of how satisfied they are with your product & app.
b) Keep improving your app:
Adapting to new trends is the key to success in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive online business environment. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and think of ways to allow maximum convenience and flexibility to access a product or service online. Leverage the current trends in your segment and follow seminars and workshops related to your field. All this will undoubtedly help you to understand the best ways to modify your app according to changing market conditions and user behavior.
Read Also: How Much Does It Cost to Develop An Application?
5. Compatibility and performance issues
Technologies are constantly evolving, and you may find compatibility issues with your app not supporting the latest device models or OS versions. This is a common challenge for almost every app owner. That is why regular app upgrades is a make-or-break concept for website and app owners to remain competitive in the market.
Solution: Constant update and upgrades
a) Regular App Maintenance:
Regular app upgrades have become integral to software development. Your team must develop improved ways to maintain the mobile application’s performance, monitor usage, and tweak features and functionality accordingly.
b) Outsourcing app maintenance and support services:
A reputed service provider can offer 360-degree monitoring and maintenance. They will thoroughly analyze the data storing structure of your app in the cache and the API latency to assure optimum speed and reduce the possibility of app crashes. They will also keep optimizing database performance for required scaling and keep your app updated with every new release of iOS and Android versions. They can resize, compress, and cache images to enhance your app’s loading time.
6. Compromised security and slow downloading speed
Nothing can be as disastrous as the slow downloading speed of a mobile app. There may be several factors behind the slow downloading speed of your apps, like router issues, software glitches, or a crumbling DNS server.
Solution: SSL & TLS to enhance security & loading speed
a) Optimize SSL/TLS:
Optimizing TLS or SSL of a mobile app keeps immense importance from both speed and security perspectives. There will be hackers looking for vulnerabilities in your mobile app, and if your app has anything to do with users’ money, TLS optimization becomes mandatory. To enhance the loading speed of your app, you can also get a list of bugs reported by your app users and fix them with a new update. This eliminates the need to update an app on every small bug fix. People often don’t entertain daily updates and quit the app when getting regular notifications for an app update.
TLS is a successor protocol to SSL, and both are also responsible for transactions through data encryption. Besides keeping your app’s data in safe transit, TLS is responsible for performance improvements. You must choose a trusted source to get a TLS certificate for your app. If your app is built by professional mobile app developers and still facing loading issues, you can ask your maintenance team to optimize TLS for better results.
Endnote
Running a successful app requires constant updates to overcome challenges like changing consumer behaviors, technological changes, and volatile market conditions. Hence, having a regular maintenance & support team is critical if you want to reap fruitful results from your mobile app.
