A few important points when creating a desktop application
Hi everybody.
I am Ivan, at the moment I am a team lead of development cross-platform desktop apps. I have been developing desktop applications for more than 20 years and have gained much experience launching new applications and maintaining already released apps. One of the developed apps has an audience of more than 100k unique users per day. As a freelancer for several years, I see that many customers want to develop an application, but they miss that not everything is limited to the app itself. Statistically, most users do not contact support with problems but simply abandon the application, so it is very important to fix even those problems that did not reach support. How can problems like this be prevented? In this article, I would like to discuss services that can be useful when deploying and maintaining a desktop application with a large audience of users.
The installer
The installer is very important for modern software and there are many frameworks for creating it. Distributing an application as an archive looks unprofessional and may alienate the user. The big thing here is the signature of both the installer itself and the executable files installed from it. Antiviruses (including built-in into Windows) can block the installation of not signed files: this will discourage some users from installing the application, and they may think that the app is unsafe.
Versioning
It is vital to know the sources of a particular version. There is a wide range of application version formats, but the main thing is the ability to know exactly which sources it is compiled from. Sources determine where to deal with problems when receiving a complaint about the functioning of the application. In case of multiple complaints, the support team can check if the user has the latest version of the application and ask the user to update the application to check the problem in the latest version. In my applications, I use the format “year.month.the build number” This format has proven itself well, it is suitable for different platforms and shows the time of the update. For example, the version created in June will be called Э24.06.0101”.
Integration and deployment (CI/CD)
When developing a cross-platform application, it is quite normal for some code to be compiled on one platform but not on another. It is necessary to rebuild the application in all possible configurations during the commit in order to fix the assembly while the memories are still fresh. It often happens that due to the complex deployment of the application, the number of releases drops, and features with fixes lie unused for a long time. Integration and deployment of the application is very important for the convenience of maintenance.
Updating the application
It is not enough to implement some features; you still need to roll it to the user. Automatic application update is the best decision here, but it can be difficult to implement in practice. The sticking points here are the need to restart the PC after the update and file access rights. In any case, implementing some minimal functionality to notify the user that a new version is available and the user can download it is required. Without notification of a new version, users will never know that you have made some cool feature or fixed an annoying bug. Frequent (but not too frequent) updates show that you are actively working on the project and increase user loyalty.
Monitoring
The main task of monitoring is to diagnose the problem as early as possible and begin to solve it. According to statistics, not many people contact support when a problem occurs, so if the notification of problems is only a request to support, then you won’t even know about most problems without monitoring. It is also very useful to have properly configured alerts in monitoring, so there will be no need to constantly monitor the charts. Monitoring can allow you to start solving the problem even if the user does not know about it yet. For example, if some servers are unavailable, then the user can only decrease the network speed and he will not pay attention to it, but you will already find out about it.
Sending reports about problems
When a user contacts support with a problem, you need to collect the maximum possible information about the environment and the application itself. If the user contacts by e-mail, this will not be possible, so it is better that he writes from the application itself. At least work logs should be added to the problem report. You can also attach screenshots of the screen or a video of the problem. Crash messages can be sent automatically with a crash dump attached.
So, your team has created the app. Congratulations! What else do you need to do:
- Create a signed installer
- Make a unique version for every release
- Implement updating of the app
- Implement a monitoring system
- Develop a process for sending reports about problems.
Now your application is really ready for users, and you can breathe deeply and.. start a new app.