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04/01/2023
15 mins read

App Scalability in Custom Software Development

The app's scalability ensures that your user base continues to grow over time. Scalability is achieved when the app is built and configured by the developer. Configure the appropriate hardware, software, and protocols to handle a high volume of requests per minute.

The future success of your app depends on scaling. Learn how to build scalable apps that drive growth. Scalability, according to the Oxford dictionary, means the ability to adapt to larger requirements in the future.

To talk about scalability in a little more detail, let's assume your product is used by 10,000 people today. Consider scalability if you're wondering if the same product can be used by 100,000 people tomorrow.

If you're interested in how scalability affects your app, let's explore how scalability works and what you need to do to improve the scalability of your software application.

1. What Is "App Scalability"?

In the app development industry, scalability describes an app's ability to handle an increasing number of users. The app's scalability ensures that your user base continues to grow over time. Scalability is achieved when the app is built and configured by the developer. Configure the appropriate hardware, software, and protocols to handle a high volume of requests per minute.

Building scalable applications has always been critical to their success. Great user experience, adaptability to growth, and increased ROI are all impacted by scalable apps.

A scalable app should be able to provide:

  • Efficient in every step, even under heavy loads
  • High-speed service regardless of the number of users
  • The ability to adapt as the number of users increases.

2. App scaling types

There are two main types of scaling apps:

  • Horizontal scaling means that your app code can add more servers or machines to increase capacity.
  • Vertical means adding resources such as CPU, memory, and network capacity so your app can handle many concurrent requests with little or no overhead. The downside of scaling up is the dependency on existing servers and limited scalability.

3. Scaling Apps Brings Lots of Benefits

Improved user experience

A key benefit of scaling your app is a seamless experience for any number of users at any given time. As it stands, the app's features can have a big impact on its UX and are important to the app. A Google study found that over 50% of his users abandon his apps and websites on mobile that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Also, users rarely tend to come back, so scalability is key to keeping users engaged and satisfied.

App usage during heavy traffic

If you're building a scalable app, use it during high-traffic times, such as celebrations and holidays, when app usage and traffic are likely to increase. During these periods, we can offer you special promotions, and your prospects can become paying customers without any errors or problems due to increased traffic.

Save money on post-launch maintenance.

If you've ever wondered how to improve the scalability of your web or mobile app, you should know that doing it first is the most important thing. Building a scalable app can have a small initial cost, but it's worth it in the long run. Because you won't have time to spend fixing your app and adapting it to handle higher traffic. If you want your app to work less in the future, put more effort and resources into it from the beginning.

Better user feedback

One of the most important things for successful app development is user feedback. The more positive reviews your app gets, the more people will use it. If you want to achieve this with as few annoying bugs as possible, make it functional and powerful. By prioritizing scalability, you can ensure your app performs well every time and grow your user base with ease.

Improve profit margin

The more people download your app, the more you earn. Further downloads often come with ratings and recommendations. So if your app is bug-free and works smoothly, your feedback and profits can be at the level you desire. Invest in scaling your app from the start and increase your revenue. Scaling your app late in the development process can be expensive.

How to improve app scalability?

Note the following points that make your app scalable:

- Performance:

If you know your app's capacity, you can identify the saturation point where your app begins to experience problems. Consider your app's ability to accommodate an increase in users.

- Recoverability:

The error is followed by the amount of time it takes for the app to return to its original working state. So make sure this is done quickly. This is an important aspect of building an app as it helps prevent loss of money and users.

- Easy management:

Apps are easy to maintain and update because a truly scalable app has no issues with updates and maintenance.

4. Scale quickly by setting your app:

If you know your application well, you can scale it in no time. If you're aware of the infrastructure and resources that can cause performance issues, you can highlight the best areas to scale.

Aim for a scaling plan, choosing horizontal, hybrid, or vertical scaling as the most viable option. Test your app during the scaling process to understand the potential latency caused by increased load.

If you want to work efficiently, avoid scaling your apps to physical servers and opt for cloud-based servers and hosting. Of course, this simplicity is key, allowing simple apps to scale easily. If you decide to build a complex app, scaling can be difficult and lead to many problems.

5. Use caching, always!

If you want to improve your app's scalability, consider caching first. Storing pre-packaged results that can be served to the user without further processing of the data is essentially what a cache does. Requests are processed faster, improving the overall user experience.

Reducing the load on system resources is determined by caching. This avoids downtime, lag, and other problems that can result from system overload.

Users hate waiting for what they need. As such, an app's success goes hand in hand with user retention.

6. Use CDNs in your advantage

A CDN is a content delivery network that can help your app scale by improving the speed of content delivery to your users. A CDN makes this possible by using multiple servers spread around the world, and accessing these servers improves your app's response time, thus improving the user experience.

For apps intended for global use, a CDN is a good option. However, this solution is neither practical nor efficient for local apps.

7. Libraries designed for performance are best

Using powerful libraries from the start will help you build scalable apps. Using JavaScript instead of Load Dash will make your app more efficient and faster. When choosing packages and libraries, focus more on scalability and performance than on software popularity.

8. Choose the proper framework

The technology you use has a big impact on the scalability of your software application. So, before starting the development process, you should learn about the types of development technologies that maximize your app's scaling potential and avoid those with little scaling potential. Angular and Node.js are popular for the high scaling potential they bring to apps built with these technologies.

9. Choose the proper host

Server configuration and infrastructure are also very important. It's not just the code when it comes to scalability. Choosing the right vendor and tools can save you a lot of time and energy.

10. Build a clean code

Clean code is probably the most common thing when it comes to scalable apps. Complex and mixed code ends up being harder to maintain and much harder to achieve scalability. It's a good practice to keep your code clean, as you can avoid mixing many pieces of code in one place.

Keep your frontend and backend layers separate as you scale your app, use design patterns wisely, and separate background jobs from your main system.

By following our advice, you'll be building truly scalable apps in no time while saving time and money, improving the user experience, and handling peak traffic hours. This is the right way, leading to more profit.

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