Most app projects require one or more third party accounts, which will need to be maintained throughout the lifetime of your app. These services will typically require a subscription, and you will have an online account to access these services. The terms and conditions of these services may vary from time to time, and you may be issued product notices through these services to which you should pay attention. Maintaining an app means maintaining the underlying services also, so please plan for this to occur.

Here are some examples of emails our customers received last year from their service providers:

• From AWS; hardware problems have been discovered on the hardware on which your server is located and we will need to restart the instance on this date.
• From a popular email service; we have introduced a paid tier to replace our previous free tier.
• From Apple; we have detected problems with your app.

Some of these are important! The email from AWS was telling the client that there server would be offline for 15 minutes. This might be ok, or not, depending on the nature of your business and when that scheduled outage might occur. We arranged for the server to be migrated at an earlier date and at a more convenient hour, rather than risk allowing the server to run any longer on the faulty hardware. The email from the email service was telling the client that they now had to pay a moderate annual fee to use the previously-free email service used by their app. The email from Apple was something that looked serious, but was something else entirely and just required the client to login to their account and provide some new category information about their legacy app.

So please do be aware that any third party accounts used by your app must be maintained by you. We’re here to help, just please do read the emails you receive from these services carefully, don’t just ignore them as spam, and let us know if something arises that you are unsure about.

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