5 Effective Ways To Reduce Angular App Maintenance Costs

5 Effective Ways To Reduce Angular App Maintenance Costs

To ensure that your Angular app stays relevant and useful to the users, investing resources in making regular updates in the app is inevitable. The real challenge that Angular app developers and IT business owners face is how to reduce Angular app maintenance costs.

As software developers, we know the journey of a successful app doesn’t culminate with deploying the app on an app store. Getting thousands of downloads isn’t the end of the story either. Any app developer’s end goal is to keep increasing daily active users (DAU), the users who keep coming back to the app in the long term.

Every Angular app requires continuous maintenance to retain the users and scale their business. Many a time, you may also need to incur additional costs in post-development services like server fees, payment processing services, push notifications mechanisms, and more.

While you cannot afford to completely ignore post-development Angular app maintenance, there are certain pre-emptive steps you can take to significantly lower its cost.

Of course, the very basic tip in developing a cost-effective Angular app is to hire an Angular developer from an outsourcing company. If you know how to choose the right offshore Angular developer for your project, you’ve already conquered half the battle. In addition, as a business owner of an IT outsourcing company myself, I can tell you that you can reduce maintenance costs even further just by developing the app in the right way.

Below are some of the insider tips I follow in order to reduce Angular app maintenance costs:

1. Be Up-To-Date With the Latest Angular Version

Since Angular is backed by Google, it’s constantly improving while also keeping a strong focus on stability. This makes it easy for you to keep your app up-to-date. It’s a good idea to upgrade your Angular app to the latest version, as it certainly helps in reducing app maintenance costs. You may be wondering how these two are related. Let me explain it briefly.

In order to keep your app relevant in changing times, a significant part of your post-development app maintenance is to add new and/or improved features to make the app more useful to your users. By upgrading your app framework to the latest Angular version, you get many leading-edge features integrated with your app without any extra effort. Newer versions also help you take advantage of automatic optimizations and bug fixes.

Also, you can reap the benefits of in-built architectural improvements in new versions without spending money on developing the same by yourself.

For these reasons, it’s always a good idea to upgrade your framework with new updates released by Angular.

2. Invest Time in Writing Clean Code

Anybody who writes code that a computer can comprehend is a good programmer. However, a great programmer is one who writes code that any other programmer can easily understand.

While developing Angular apps, putting in extra time to design your code and architecture in an efficient, readable manner goes a long way in reducing the overall cost of the app. Clean code is highly maintainable because it facilitates easy implementation of changes, especially if updates are to be made by developers other than the original author of the code.

In order to eliminate any doubts or misunderstandings about the code, ensure that the code possesses clarity in terms of the flow of the app. When it is time to add or eliminate certain functionalities from your Angular app, any developer working on the app must find it easy to understand details about all the variables involved and how different components collaborate with each other. Clean code also makes it easier for the developers to easily extend and refactor the code.

Also, when classes and methods in the code are predictable and the public APIs are clear and concise, code testing becomes extremely quick, and the code is easy to change.

In a nutshell, clean coding is an effective way to reduce maintenance costs because it leads to faster debugging, upgrading, and testing for all Angular apps. As a developer, you can save a lot of time and money on redoing the code work if you start your Angular app development with clear and clean code.

3. Analyze Compatibility With Third-Party APIs

It is very likely that there are at least a couple of third-party APIs integrated with your Angular app in order to provide versatile features to your users. While choosing the APIs for your app, you must keep in mind that they will be updated over time regardless of whether they will be helpful to your app. This, in turn, raises maintenance concerns for your app’s long-term performance.

The surest way to avoid any integration issues between the app and the API in the future is to choose an API that will be compatible with your app even when it gets updated in the future. This may require some trial and error on your part, but the long-term benefits of having a compatible API cannot be understated.

Even if you are sure you have chosen an API that will be compatible with your Angular app, you can’t afford to just sit back and relax after that. It’s vital to keep monitoring all the third-party APIs for the latest changes and new features. If you miss out on an update and fail to respond to the changes in the API, your app may experience sudden breakages. This may greatly add to the app maintenance costs.

Thus, be cautious while doing third-party API integration, and have your solutions ready for future updates. Understanding API modules in detail and choosing the right ones during the app development process will eliminate the need to replace them in the future and help you save a lot of maintenance costs.

4. Avoid Unnecessary Features

A major portion of Angular app maintenance consists of the costs incurred while adding new features to the app. In 2020, trends in app development are changing faster than any other industry. You may be tempted to keep adding new features to your app in order to keep up with the changing times and customer demands.

However, the regular addition of new features can cost you a lot if you aren’t mindful of the long-term impact of these new functionalities.

So how do you determine which solutions you should add to your existing set of features?

These two considerations can help you make the right decision that maximizes the return on investment while minimizing the additional maintenance costs:

Customer Value

Considering the number of user requests asking for supplementary features, you have to analyze each one meticulously in terms of the concrete value it delivers to your entire customer base. The users aren’t always tech experts. There may be times when you will have to decide not to add an in-demand feature simply because it might sabotage the real value and simplicity of your Angular app.

Cons of the Feature

Sometimes, a new feature may affect the functionalities of the existing features of your Angular app. It may also slow down or clutter the performance of the app. In such cases, adding one new feature will require you to make changes in many other components of the app. Needless to say, this increases the maintenance costs many times over.

You should always carry out an in-depth analysis of these factors while deciding whether or not to introduce a new feature in your app. Determine whether the new feature will improve or add to the app’s function. If it is a beneficial part of the scope of your integral solutions, you can go ahead with it ONLY after discussing its pros and cons with the entire team of developers.

5. Extensive Proactive Testing

No matter how skillful a programmer you are, it is impossible to roll out software that doesn’t encounter some errors. App maintenance is all about keeping your app free of bugs and providing a smooth experience to your users.

If you want to avoid the costs incurred in repairing the system failures, you have to take a proactive approach in your app development process.

An early app-testing system, carried out simultaneously with app development, can avoid a large chunk of performance glitches your Angular app might encounter later. With comprehensive testing, you can adhere to quality coding standards that reduce repair tasks in the future.

One of the most effective ways to reduce Angular app maintenance costs is to make your QA team a part of the development process instead of passing on the fully developed app to a separate QA team. They can provide you with accurate feedback well in time so you don’t have to encounter any issues at the last moment.

Apart from reducing maintenance costs, an all-encompassing testing system also contributes to your business conversions and customer engagement.

Building a Strong Foundation

In essence, the most effective way to reduce Angular app maintenance costs is to build a strong foundational structure. Map out the whole development process carefully and estimate the costs associated with each app component ahead of time. Being proactive in your approach will not only reduce the burden of reworking on your part, it will also strengthen your app’s brand image. You will be amazed to see how your app grows over time with an ever increasing number of happy customers.