Optimising the process to update an IOS app

vikash surin
2 min readMar 9, 2024

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When was the last time you updated your app.

So one fine morning I wanted to update my Instagram app because I was facing some technical issues and I assumed it as a bug in the current version. So I swiped up and landed on the home screen where there’s instagram icon. I long pressed on the instagram icon and a list of context menu popped up. And instinctively I looked for the update app option, but could not find.

The context menu had many options(img attached below) like camera, New Post and View notifications, etc. All these are good but why Update app is missing. Is this because nobody updates apps every now and then. Or other reasons like context menu could get lengthy?

According to my general understanding, App like Instagram pushes app updates frequently, because it is being used by millions of people every moment, and many bugs are patched through updates which are very common and frequent.

How we do it now?

The current process to update a single app follows us through several steps. just like I have described in the image below. In this way it takes much more time and efforts like typing and searching the app on the app store, just to update a single app. This process can be optimised. lets see how in the next section.

Current process to update an app.

Simple solution to effectively save time and effort to update and app.

Adding an Update App option while long pressing the app icon.

The context menu had update app option(Please don’t mind the trailing icon for update app)

Animated prototype attached below. Please click on Restart or R to play it.

Prototype for the same.

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