Supporting an app
Fairy tales can be short; once upon a time someone made an app without bugs and never needed to be updated.
In the real world, apps have bugs. Even apps developed by the largest companies in the world have bugs. Apple has them, Google has them, Microsoft has them, and so do we – though we often think we have far fewer than some of these auspicious giants, and get away with far less, but we digress. Sometimes developers make mistakes. Sometimes a flow or combination of events is just never considered and could never realistically be expected to cause side effects, but does. Sometimes the tools on which our code is based has flaws, or the third party services we rely on change the way they work, suffer failures, or have bugs of their own. Sometimes a new security patch or update comes out and breaks something that worked before, or maybe there is a new OS or screen size, or something. Something almost always happens, so it is sensible to plan for this in your budget, in your time allocation, and in your mind, so that when something does happen we just fix it and move on.
Most apps evolve over time. We add new features requested by users, or by administrators who want to make their jobs a little easier, or change the appearance to suit a new corporate brand or taste. When we deliver an minimum viable product (MVP) viable product especially, the aim is to specifically deliver a core set of functionality and wait to see what users say about the product before deciding what, if anything, needs to be added. We encourage our clients to break their projects down into stages, to deliver milestones and assess successive iterations based on the feedback they are receiving. If you plan for your app to succeed, then you should plan for how you’re going to evolve your product over time, knowing that the course is fluid but with some notion of what the end goal might look like.
Another part of supporting an app is maintaining accounts. This aspect of running an app business if often overlooked, so we’ve given it a page of its own.