What to ask your agency about mobile release cadence

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on mobile release cadence, these questions are worth asking early.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Users on old versions are your compatibility floor. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Force-upgrade prompts should be a last resort. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

In practice

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. Three things worth confirming about mobile release cadence before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Users on old versions are your compatibility floor — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.