Can we make users update their apps and OS regularly?

In the Indian market, smartphone users do not update Mobile apps and Mobile OS as regularly as required leading to sub-optimal user experience and exposed security vulnerabilities. We have seen developers and product managers fretting that their users don’t update their app on time and they have a significant number of users distributed in older versions of the app. The same applies to Operating Systems' updates of Android and iOS which is more challenging in the case of Android due to the huge number of OEMs and their flavour of OSs in different versions of Android which varies based on the smartphone model making it more challenging for the Android landscape.

The challenge is to design a solution to address this problem of users not updating their Mobile apps and OS regularly.

Why users don’t update their Mobile apps and OS?

App developers and OS developers invest significant resources in rolling out updates to the masses just to see only a handful of their users updating their apps and OS. Hence, their significant number of new users will not get new features and security updates. The reasons for not updating varies between the categories of users. These are some of the major factors for users not updating and also highlighting the category of users:

1. Users with awareness issue: Many users are not aware of the issues they may face if they’re don’t regularly update their apps and OS. There is very less awareness created by Android and iOS platforms which are the major smartphone platforms in India and the world.
2. Users not having access to Wifi: Android provides auto-updates while connected to Wifi option for its users. India has very less Wifi connectivity penetration. 

Number of Mobile Subscribers in India - 1.16 Billion (Statista, 2019)

Number of 4G users - 44% - 510 Million (Statista, 2019)

Number of wired broadband users - 21.24 Million (DoT, 2018)

Generally, Wifi is created from wired broadband connections. Hence, auto-update via Wifi is not a solution for the masses in the Indian market.

3. Users who find the app updates cumbersome: Even for the users who are aware of the app update option and probable consequences of not updating the same, the current process to update is very cumbersome if they do not have Wifi and if they have to manually update 1 after the other. For example: If users have 50 apps on average installed on their smartphone and if the number of updates per month is 2 per app. Then there are 100 updates in a month which is approximately 3 app updates per day on average. Also, the OS updates are generally once a month for security updates and once in 2 - 6 months for major updates by OEMs. Considering that the app updates happen regularly and OS updates monthly 4G only users need to remind themselves to do these regularly which is a cumbersome activity.

4. Users who finish off their daily download limits with other use cases: We know that daily download upload limit type of plans are the most prevalent ones in India. A good % of users will finish off their download limit for browsing their favourite videos or content on OTTs, Social Media etc. Hence, they don't have data available every day for updating their apps and OS.

5. Users with device storage issues: We know the major chunk of smartphones sold in India is in sub Rs. 10k category where the storage is always a constraint and the majority of storage goes for photos and videos taken and downloaded. Unless they automatically store it in the cloud and free up their storage space they don't have space for the app or OS updates. This is also an issue in a good number of users.

User Segmentation

The user segments and the factors affecting them discussed above are not mutually exclusive in nature and there will be users having more than any single issue. Hence, I will consider a hybrid approach where the target segment will not be having access to Wifi and they find the app/OS update process to be cumbersome.

The problem considered for solving:

The option of updating the apps through current methods are cumbersome and need better solutions.

Current solutions used by app companies:

1. Forward-thinking Apps generally notify their users through in-app updates. Once the users fire up the app, the app update option subtly displayed on the home page without intruding the user experience to a great extent. 

• Users who generally do not update the app because its cumbersome to do it regularly might do it if they are not in a hurry to complete their tasks in the app.
• Also, here the user is updating only that particular app and if the users feel that he/she can accommodate that many MBs of downloading from that day’s quota for this use case, they may go ahead.  

Hence, the % of users who update with this strategy might vary based on the user segments. Overall, in my opinion, should be less than 10%.

2. Forcefully updating the app without which the app usage is not allowed. This method is followed only in cases where there are critical updates and the company wants all its users to have the update. For example, a security update or a very big feature probably game-changing one. This may cause many users to uninstall the application especially if its in the vitamin category of applications.

3. Notification is generally sent by Playstore on how many apps have pending updates. This again is ignored by a significant population.

Current solutions used by OS/OEM companies:

1. A persistent notification that an app update is available.
2. App update can be downloaded now but can be installed at a later time even schedule it as Samsung provides. This solves the problem of installing once the update is downloaded but doesn’t solve the problem of downloading the update itself which is the bigger problem.
3. Some companies provide the option to pause the downloading of the OS update. This is a helpful feature in solving our case to some extent. If users intelligently plan to download a 1 GB update in chunks in 10 days, they can still update their OS. But, doing this manually is a very big pain for the user. Here, the user will have to remember to do this every day and will also have to check their remaining quota and also estimate how much they should save for other activities. Only a handful number of users go to this extent of downloading an OS update. (I am one of these guys :))

Potential Solution:

We all know that OS providers and OEMs track Mobile data usage. Also, as Playstore and Android are owned by Google Appstore and iOS is owned by Apple that internal coordination should not be a challenge. The same thing applies to OEMs who want to promote their in-house app stores. They can come up with these features to solve this problem once and for all:

I call this feature as ‘True Auto updater’. This applies to both app and OS updates. The potential features can be:

1. Option to schedule a particular time every day when the auto-update is supposed to happen every day if there any updates available.
2. Option to set a per-day download limit for auto-update purpose.
3. Option to identify the lean times of the phone usage like sleeping time etc when the updates can happen without user inconvenience. This can be easily identified based on user behaviour. Once it is identified, the user can be notified to activate the same to get the user’s consent.
4. There will always be days when data usage would be relatively very less due to a multitude of reasons. User can be notified to get the consent to go beyond the daily download limit of xxMB on that particular day.

Risks in the solution:

1. Users may not enable the feature itself in the 1st place. Some creative methods of communication need to be explored for users to adopt this. This can be made a mandatory feature while the user is setting up a new smartphone for the 1st time.
2. The network connectivity issues might be there on days when the usage was lesser. On these days, the feature will not work.
3. The notifications to get consent from the user might be ignored by the users. In this case, the users might have to educate about the importance of having the apps and OS up to date. Hence, the awareness problem may need to be solved for this to succeed.
4. There might be a significant user base who is finishing their download limit every day not giving room for auto-update to happen through Wifi.
5. Users may not have storage space in their phones for updates to happen.

Moonshot Holy grail solution:

The need to update the app is eliminated. Just like how the backend updates are performed without user’s interference even the app updates should happen. So updates can happen continuously in small chunks rather than installing entirely new build altogether just like how web applications are updated. This is a very complex task to be accomplished. There might be significant works happening in the background by Google, Apple etc. Also, web apps or PWA cannot be a replacement for the native counterparts. They come with significant challenges in their capabilities and user experiences.