The challenge for developers is finding the right balance between ‘not enough’ updates and ‘too many’ of them. Further, with so much competition in the app marketplace, updates are important to keep your app relevant, offer new features and integrate something that keeps users hooked.
With top apps like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, updates happen once every week. However, you must also note that people don’t mind frequent updates when a publisher is at the top of his game. There’s no alternative to Facebook or Instagram, at least, at this point in time. However, if you are not as popular as Facebook or Instagram, 4 updates every month can be too much of it! So, what’s the best course of action?
Keeping it regular
Depending on the type of app you are publishing and the user base you have, a fairly regular interval for app updates could be between three and four weeks. This not only helps developers push new features into the app but also meets the expectations of end users while challenging competitors and keeping up with the technological developments in the app marketplaces.
Finding the balance
Though regularity is the key to successful app updates, you must also understand that it will have an impact on the end user’s behavior. The demographics can be widely divided into two groups and each approach app updates in different ways. The first group consists of auto-updaters, who are okay with a hand’s off experience and will not mind or even notice an update happening. The second group however is the manual updater who needs to understand every feature of the new update before it approves of it. The challenge with the auto updater group lies in permission issues and connectivity while the challenge with the latter is the length of time it would take for the latest update to proliferate. A middle way out is having a legacy version of your app handy.
Too many updates can frustrate a user and too less of them can bring apprehensions about the stability of the app. You will need to understand your user base to find the right balance. This brings us to the next point.
Understand your users and market
Now, finding the right balance by understanding your audience group might be a daunting task. However, there are generalizations that you can use. If you are publishing an enterprise level app, users will be okay with updates as long as they make the framework secure and stable. Frequent updates in this case will also save you from extreme changes once every while, leading to a complicated and unwanted deployment process.
With the general mobile app user base on the other hand, new features every few weeks generally keep people engaged and happy. The important thing is that updates should be accompanied by something new and not just bug fixes and technical updates.
Watching your competitors
The best way to understand the balance for pushing updates is closely watching your competitors. Even if you are a unique publisher, you might want to take a look at an app that has the same level of popularity and shares the same kind of user base.
Overall, it’s about a thorough understanding of the market and the pulse of the end users. Once you find the right spot, it would be a smooth and profitable ride.