What is Green App Maintenance? Concept, Strategies & Tools

Does your app consume a lot of resources during maintenance? Well, it is a big concern for the environment.

In the current era, where every other app business is in a race to capture a large share of the market then be the one to adopt sustainable measures to retain users.

Growing carbon emissions in the environment have become the greatest parameter. People are running after eco-friendly measures to live and sustain.

Then, what stops the IT sector from pushing a little just to prevent harmful impacts of energy consumption on the environment?

You might be bothered about the ways to prevent the environment from carbon emission at your level, is it correct?

If you have missed this chance during app development then it’s time to adopt it during maintenance. Once an app development procedure is completed, maintaining it contains a lot of resources along with a high energy consumption.

The ultimate solution to such an issue is to adopt sustainable app maintenance.

Yes, sustainable app maintenance. It is not at all rocket-science as you ever thought.

Let’s learn this evolving term together with techniques, concepts, benefits, tools, and case studies.

Green App Maintenance: An Evolving Technique

Before proceeding to the techniques or tools, here is the definition of green app maintenance.

Green app maintenance is a term that completely focuses on reducing the environmental impact of maintenance. It includes the usage of sustainable practices as well as technologies for optimizing consumption and minimizing wastage.

The technique aims to ensure that the applications are maintained in an optimized manner. It helps to minimize the carbon footprint through green hosting solutions. This also ensures that the applications are safe and secure to use by implementing innovative solutions.

Now, as we discussed the concept of app maintenance, it is vital to learn the reasons behind adopting one. The next section will help you in this scenario.

Why Green App Maintenance Matters?

What’s the importance of app maintenance?

Well, within green app maintenance, the term app maintenance is common although there is a difference when it comes to adopting sustainable practices.

After learning the concept, let’s study diversified ways of adopting sustainable app maintenance.

Here’s a list to proceed with.

1. Ensures Maximum Energy Efficiency

Green app maintenance offers optimum usage of energy why using effective tools and techniques. It offers minimal or no impact on the environment. The green-tech also aims to adopt significant practices in day-to-day businesses by performing strategic planning.

2. Cost-Savings

If you think sustainability can cost you high, then it’s wrong. Environmental gains can end up being a financial gain for your business. Eco-friendly maintenance practices can go a long way in reducing energy and consuming resources. It can help reduce the cost of app maintenance.

3. Enhances User Experience

User experience is one of the important practices that need to be considered during app maintenance. Sustainable app maintenance is key to improving user experience through optimizing energy efficiency that assists in extending the battery life of the device.

4. Technological Innovation

Through energy efficiency, it becomes prominent to drive innovative solutions useful for the development of new tools as well as technologies. This technological innovation provides improved practices helpful for app maintenance.

5. Implementation of CSR

Adopting green app maintenance leads to improved brand image in terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR). You can hire mobile app developers who can assist in the process of implementing current sustainability practices. It will attract users and enhance their reputation.

6. Have a Global Impact

Implementation of sustainable app maintenance at this small level of app maintenance has a large impact on the global level. A small gesture to save energy can result in ensuring the growth of the app. It represents a collective measure to initiate environmental practices.

7. Extend the Cycle of Services or Products

Through adopting sustainable management, you can ensure that the services and product cycle lasts longer. Green app maintenance reduces energy wastage and automatically provides you with ways to reuse energy and avoid waste. This ultimately increases the lifecycle of the app.

8. Helps to Improve Competitive Position

In this highly competitive world, it is essential to sustain the competitive environment, and adopting sustainable practices helps you to get ahead of it. If you know how to optimize the app performance, halfway toward success is achieved.

These are some of the benefits and reasons that can motivate you to continue with green app maintenance practice.

Now, it’s time to learn the strategies for adopting sustainable app maintenance.

Strategies to Adopt for Sustainable App Maintenance

Till now, you learned about the green app maintenance concept and the reasons behind adopting one. Shall we proceed toward strategies for adopting sustainable app maintenance?

Here are certain points to proceed with.

• Introducing Energy-Saving Features

You can make your app stand out among the competitors by adopting energy-saving features.

Users always seek features that save their phone’s battery and help them use essential features even when their smartphones are about to die.

Features such as automatic screen brightness, dark mode along efficient data caching can be introduced.

• Reduce Network Request

Through maintaining an app, you should admire the request of the network used within the process.

Network communication within the apps utilizes a lot of energy and to save it, app maintenance should be performed by sending fewer requests that use less data.

They can do this by storing the data and by processing batches.

• Creating User-Friendly Interfaces

While maintaining eco-friendly interfaces and apps, it is vital to prioritize UI/UX designs that are user-friendly.

It includes streamlining the navigation system after minimizing clutter which can further enhance user satisfaction.

While maintaining an app, it is significant to use practices that can simplify the user interface and minimize cognitive load.

• Maintaining the Background Process Wisely

The background process within an app matters the most. Maintaining it smartly can help you to optimize the coding procedure effectively.

Using too much energy over it can drain the user’s device battery. During the maintenance process, it is significant to focus on the important task by reducing unnecessary battery usage.

Smartly maintenance of the network can help save energy and make apps faster to respond.

• Using Smart Hardware

Leveraging hardware built to save energy is an important activity to be considered.

Smart hardware solutions can be useful to reduce mobile app maintenance downtime by using features including multimedia tools and sensors.

Using such hardware systems and techniques can be effective in making apps use less power and work better enabling phone batteries to last longer.

• Resource Management

Through efficiently managing resources and their location, minimizing unnecessary processing plays an important role.

Here, it is significant to properly manage the memory to avoid excessive usage as well as frequent collection of garbage.

After increasing the memory management services capability within an app, it can be transformed into energy-intensive software.

• Use of the Latest Technology

Industry 4.0 technologies can be used to enhance the process of app maintenance.

Optimizing machine learning algorithms, and using artificial intelligence and IoT within app maintenance can increase its overall performance.

Here, you can implement mobile app predictive maintenance to ensure its success.

Apart from the above-mentioned strategies, identification of app maintenance best practices and adapting them to ensure the app’s growth is relevant.

In the next section, effective tools are discussed for ensuring green app maintenance.

Effective Tools to Enable Green Mobile App Maintenance

Strategies aren’t enough to start a green app maintenance process, so what’s next?

Here we are discussing relevant tools for enabling green app maintenance.

1] Profiling and Monitoring

Using profiling as a branch of monitoring can help extract and analyze performance statistics related to operations and queues.

Adopting a Greenspector can be useful for measuring as well as analyzing the energy consumption of mobile and web applications.

2] Use of Performance Optimization Tools

With the assistance of a linting tool for JavaScript, you can ensure code quality as well as efficiency by recognizing potential inefficiencies.

The use of SonarQube which is a tool that evaluates code for performance issues, vulnerabilities, security, and inefficiencies can be effective for adopting green app maintenance service.

3] Network Usage Optimization

For network usage optimization, you should implement Charles proxy for successfully monitoring, network requests and can enable unnecessary data transfers.

Wireshark can be used to avoid network-related issues. It is an effective open-source analyzer useful for capturing and displaying real-time details linked to network traffic.

4] Tools for Resource Management

There are two kinds of tools that can be helpful for you to ensure resource management. One of them is the Firebase performance monitoring tool. It can be useful for tracking performance and fixing any related issues.

Here you can enable the usage of a memory leak detection library for Android useful to identify and fix memory leaks.

5] Energy Profiling Tools

These tools can summarize overall energy consumption for visualizing and establishing a baseline to optimize the app’s energy.

Use of trepn profiler which can provide detailed insights into CPU, GPU, network usage, and memory should be used for optimizing the app’s energy.

6] Caching and Data Management Tools

There are diversified caching tools you must implement. The use of SQLite which is a lightweight database can help reduce the need for frequent network requests.

Other than this, for image-loading libraries, Glide or Picasso can be checked during app maintenance. It is also useful for reducing the energy required to handle image resources.

7] Deployment Tools

During green app maintenance, the use of Jenkins which is an open-source automation server can be helpful.

It can help to automate the parts of software development that are related to building, deploying, and testing servers. Along with this, CircleCI is a suitable tool for developing, testing, and deploying software.

These were certain tools you can use during green app maintenance. You can keep a mobile app maintenance checklist suitable to identify functions already updated or required to be maintained.

Want some case studies or examples that show the practical implementation of the green app maintenance process?

The next section can help you in this scenario.

Examples & Case Studies Related to Green App Maintenance

An app maintenance process becomes successful, only when it provides fruitful results, right?

Thus, here are some case studies that represented a real-time scenario of implementing green app maintenance.

►WhatsApp

How much energy do you think WhatsApp uses to work?

Well, multiple green app maintenance elements help it to sustain. Efficient network usage minimizes data usage by reducing the energy required for transmission.

You can develop an app like WhatsApp that uses a continuous monitoring parameter to ensure minimal resource consumption.

►Spotify

Spotify uses adaptive streaming technology to adjust the quality of the stream which is based on network conditions.

Data caching is an app useful for frequently accessing songs along with playlists, effective for reducing the need for repeated networks.

Dark mode is another feature accessible to save energy consumption that you can consider while building an app like Spotify.

►Google Maps

Have you used Google Maps ever? Does it work when there is a low battery level in your phone?

The adaptive algorithm within the app is built to adjust its functioning based on the user’s location. This represents the use of sustainable app maintenance practices.

Within Google Maps, real-time profiling works suitable to ensure that the app remains energy efficient without any complex functionality.

►Snapchat

Advanced compression techniques are being utilized for videos and images to minimize data usage.

It also contains background task management software that limits its non-essential tasks to save battery life. Develop an app like Snapchat using these effective features.

An automated regular update helps to incorporate the latest energy-saving technologies within the app.

►Duolingo

Duolingo makes use of content delivery networks to minimize data transfer as well as energy usage.

This app makes the usage of the dark mode option effective for reducing screen energy consumption.

Along with this, it makes the usage of static code analysis as well as regular refactoring for ensuring its codebase as well as resource consumption.

Also Read: Create a Language Learning App Like Duolingo

With the given case studies, it might be clear to you the importance of using green app maintenance for the overall growth of the business.

Well, without a team it’s impossible to implement such as maintenance process for your app.

Confused about which is the right team to select?

How is Nimble AppGenie, a One-Stop Solution for App Maintenance?

When it comes to deciding on team selection, you should be aware of teams that provide such a service.

Nimble AppGenie is the best App Maintenance Service Provider. We understand the importance of sustainable app maintenance and know smart ways to attempt it.

With a panel of experts, maintain your app successfully.

Conclusion

Green app maintenance is all about considering the environmental impact that takes place during app maintenance. Its mission is to maintain an app sustainably and in an optimized manner.

There are multiple ways, you should opt for green app maintenance such as it saves costs, improves brand image through CSR, enhances user experience, and improves competitive position in the market.

With multiple strategies, you can adopt this practice including reducing network requests, maintaining background processes, creating a user-friendly interface, use of smart hardware, and implementing the latest technology.

With the right tools and learning from case studies, you can decide to implement green app maintenance.

FAQs

Niketan Sharma

Niketan Sharma is the CTO of Nimble AppGenie, a prominent website and mobile app development company in the USA that is delivering excellence with a commitment to boosting business growth & maximizing customer satisfaction. He is a highly motivated individual who helps SMEs and startups grow in this dynamic market with the latest technology and innovation.