HOME/APP LIFECYCLE

App Lifecycle Services

Keeping an app healthy for the years after the launch party

Shipping version 1.0 is the cheap part. Store rankings decay, operating systems break things twice a year, and crashes accumulate in the versions nobody on the team is still running — we take on the work that keeps an app installed, discoverable and worth opening.

Book a free consultation See our work

A senior engineer replies within 24 hours — not a sales rep.

What happens to apps after the build team leaves

Downloads fell and nobody can say why

The listing has not changed in two years. Competitors rewrote their titles and subtitles, the store's algorithm shifted, and a run of two-star reviews about a bug you fixed months ago still sits at the top of the page. Paid acquisition is covering the gap, which means you are renting the installs that organic search used to give you free.

Every September and every Android release is a fire drill

Apple ships a new iOS and something breaks — a permission prompt behaves differently, a deprecated API stops responding, a layout collapses on a new screen size. Google raises the target SDK level and your app becomes unlistable until someone updates it. Nobody owns watching the beta releases, so you find out from users.

The crash rate is known and nobody triages it

Crashlytics is installed and quietly filling up. Nobody has separated the one crash affecting eight percent of sessions on a specific Android version from the two hundred that hit one device each. Without that separation the list looks hopeless, so it gets ignored, and the fixable problem stays in production for a year.

The original developers are gone and nothing is written down

The build only works on a laptop that has left the building, the signing certificate is in a Slack thread, dependencies are four major versions behind, and the one person who understood the sync logic moved on. A change that should take a day takes three weeks because the first two are spent getting the project to compile.

How we run an app after launch

Post-launch work goes wrong when it is treated as a queue of tickets. We treat it as ownership: someone is accountable for the crash rate, the store position and the next OS release, and that person tells you what changed each month.

We start by taking control of the build

Before any feature or listing work, we get the project building reproducibly in CI, move signing into a managed store, upgrade the dependencies that are blocking everything else, and document the release path. It is unglamorous and it is the difference between a two-day fix and a two-week one for the rest of the engagement.

Crashes ranked by users affected, not by count

We group the noise, identify the handful of issues actually costing you sessions, and fix those first — usually a specific OS version, a specific manufacturer, or a state the app enters after a background kill. Crash-free session rate becomes a number you see monthly, with the trend, rather than a dashboard nobody opens.

Store listings treated as a running experiment

Keywords, screenshots, preview videos and the first three lines of the description all move installs, and each store weighs them differently. We change one thing at a time, watch conversion in App Store Connect and Play Console, and keep what works. Review responses are part of this: replying properly to a bad review changes the rating a prospective user sees.

OS releases handled before they arrive, not after

We track the developer betas from summer onwards, build against the new SDKs early, and fix what breaks while it is still a beta rather than while your users are on it. Target SDK deadlines on Play go in the calendar as hard dates, because missing one takes your app off the store.

What this covers

Pick the piece you need, or bring us the problem and we'll tell you which applies.

App Store Optimization

Most apps get a listing written the week before submission and never touched again, which leaves organic installs on the table permanently. ASO is the work of making the store page findable for the terms your buyers actually type, then convincing the people who land on it to tap install. It is measurable, it compounds, and it is far cheaper than buying the same users through ads.

Keyword and competitor research per store — App Store keyword fields and Play's indexing of the description behave differently and need separate treatment
Title, subtitle and short description rewritten around search intent rather than internal product language
Screenshot and preview video sequencing that answers the objection your reviews keep surfacing, tested with custom product pages and store listing experiments
Rating and review management: prompting at the right moment in the app, and replying to negatives so the visible rating recovers

App Maintenance & Support

An app is not a finished artefact — it is a piece of software running on platforms that change underneath it twice a year. Maintenance covers the OS upgrades, dependency currency, crash triage and small improvements that keep a live app working and keep your release process from seizing up. This is also how we take on apps built by someone else, starting with getting them buildable and shippable again. The backend counts as part of the app here, because a large share of what users report as app bugs turns out to be server-side.

iOS and Android version readiness tested against developer betas, plus Play target SDK deadlines tracked as hard dates
Crash and ANR triage prioritised by affected sessions, with fixes shipped through staged rollouts
Third-party SDK, library and framework upgrades handled deliberately rather than accumulating into a blocked release
Build and signing recovery for apps whose original team has gone, including reproducible CI builds and documented release runbooks

The stack we build on

Chosen to fit the problem — not because it's what we used last time.

Monitoring & diagnostics

Firebase Crashlytics
Sentry
Datadog
App Store Connect analytics
Play Console vitals
Firebase Performance Monitoring

Store & growth tooling

App Store Connect
Google Play Console
Custom product pages
Store listing experiments
Mixpanel
Firebase Analytics

Release engineering

Fastlane
GitHub Actions
Bitrise
TestFlight
Play internal testing tracks
Staged rollouts

Codebase upkeep

Swift
Kotlin
React Native
Flutter
Dependabot
Detox & XCTest

How we'll work together

Every stage ends with something in your hands — not a status update.

01
Health check and handover
We audit what you actually have: whether the project builds from a clean checkout, where the certificates live, how far behind the dependencies are, what the crash and review data say, and how the listings currently perform against comparable apps.
You get: A written health report covering build reproducibility, crash hotspots, dependency risk and store listing gaps, with a prioritised remediation list.
02
Stabilise the release path
Automated builds, signing moved somewhere a bus factor of one cannot hurt you, staged rollouts configured, and the top crashes cleared. The goal of this phase is that shipping an urgent fix stops being an event.
You get: A working CI pipeline, managed signing assets in your accounts, a documented release runbook, and a measurable drop in the crash rate.
03
Listing work and measured iteration
Keyword research against what people actually search in your category, rewritten titles and subtitles, new screenshots built around the objection your reviews keep raising, then changes released one at a time so the result is attributable.
You get: Updated store listings on both platforms, a keyword and competitor baseline, and a conversion report after each change cycle.
04
Ongoing ownership
A standing monthly rhythm: OS beta testing, dependency and SDK upgrades, crash triage, review responses, and a slice of capacity kept for the small improvements that never justify their own project.
You get: A monthly report on crash-free rate, ratings, store performance and releases shipped, plus a rolling plan for the next period.

Where we've applied this

Health & fitness

Subscription apps where churn is driven by a broken sync or a crash in week two, and where seasonal search demand rewards listings that get refreshed rather than left alone.

Retail & e-commerce

Shopping apps that cannot afford a checkout crash during a sale period, and where screenshot and keyword work competes against far larger acquisition budgets.

Mobility & transport

Ride and delivery apps whose background location and notification behaviour has to be re-verified every time either platform tightens its rules.

Finance

Banking and wallet apps with hard obligations around SDK currency, encryption and biometric APIs, where an out-of-date dependency is a compliance question as much as a technical one.

Education

Learning apps with sharp enrolment peaks, where the release calendar has to work around term dates and the listing has to speak to parents as well as students.

Media & community

Content apps where the rating shown next to the icon does more for install rate than anything else on the page, and where review response is a real growth lever.

Clients we've built for

Real products, in production, with real users on them.

Fit and Fab With Swati

evera

Mobile Travelers

Prime Selection

Questions buyers ask us

Will you support an app your team did not build?

Yes — it is most of this work. We begin with a paid health check covering whether the project builds from a clean checkout, where the signing assets are, how far the dependencies have drifted and what the crash data shows. You get that report whether or not you continue with us, and it tells you honestly if any layer is past economic repair rather than us quietly billing around it.

How long does ASO take to show results?

Keyword and metadata changes typically start moving ranking within a few weeks, because the stores need to re-index and gather conversion signal before anything settles. Screenshot and video changes usually show up faster in conversion rate than in ranking. The honest framing is that ASO is a compounding programme rather than a one-off fix — the first pass gives you the biggest step, and everything after that is iteration against measurement.

What does app maintenance actually cost?

It scales with how much of the app you want actively owned. A stability-only arrangement covering OS releases, crash triage and security patching is modest. Adding a stream of feature work, ASO cycles and backend upkeep costs more because it consumes real engineering capacity every month. We size it after the health check, since an app carrying three years of deferred upgrades needs more attention in the first quarter than afterwards.

Can you get to our store accounts and certificates if we have lost access?

Usually, though it can take time. Apple and Google both have account recovery and transfer processes, and we will walk you through them — what we cannot do is bypass them. Where a previous agency still holds the account, an app transfer is generally possible and preserves your reviews and rankings, which a fresh listing would not. Worth starting early: these processes move at the platforms' pace, not ours.

Do you fix backend problems too, or only the app?

Both, and the distinction matters less than it seems. A meaningful share of what users report as app bugs are actually API latency, a push notification pipeline that has stopped delivering, or an expired certificate on the server side. We monitor the backend alongside the client and fix it in the same engagement rather than handing the ticket back to you.

What happens if we want to move maintenance in-house later?

You should be able to, and we set the engagement up so you can. Everything lives in your repository and your store accounts throughout, the release runbook is written for someone who has not met us, and dependency upgrades keep the codebase current rather than letting it drift into something only we understand. When the time comes we run handover sessions with your engineers and stay reachable while they settle in.

Have an app that needs someone to own it?

Send us the store links and whatever you know about the current state — even if that is only that installs are falling and nobody has the certificates. A senior engineer replies within one business day with what we would look at first.

Book a free consultation Browse all services