What is a force update, and why every mobile app needs this feature

Let's say you're developing a banking app, and one day you find some serious security issues in a previous version of the app.

What do you do next?
You release a new version with a patch that aims to solve all of them.
50% of your users seemlessly get the latest version of the app as they have "automatic updates" feature enabled. The other half will still use an outdated version of the app, suffer from those issues, give it one star and write negative feedback in the store, so no one will trust your app/bank when they see these reviews.

How to avoid such situations?
That's where the "forced update" comes into play.
It is a simple mechanism that prevents your users of using an outdated version of the app as soon as you say so.

How does it work?
During the app initialization process you ask your server or Firebase remote config what the minimum allowable version of the app is. If current version number is lower than the allowable one, show user an alert that he needs to update the app with only one possible way of closing it - actually updating the app. And don't forget about the "Update" button, which should redirect the user to the store.

Furthermore, you can also implement "soft update*" feature, but you must be careful not to overwhelm your users with annoying pop-ups every time they enter your app.

I've described only one possible case when this feature could be useful. Another one may be when your backend introduces some breaking changes with the latest update, and your app turns into a pumpkin unable to support these changes.

As you can see, this feature is simple to implement, though it may save your life in the future. So, I believe that every mobile app must have this feature right from the first release.

*telling a user that a new version of the app is available, while allowing to hide the pop-up and continue using the current version

#dev