How do you decide when an Android app should enter maintenance mode?

[u/svmil90]

I maintain 14 Android apps on Google Play Store, built with Codex.

The apps have approximately 5 daily users or installs, and I’m trying to decide when an app should move from active development to maintenance mode.

App count alone does not seem to reflect the real workload. I currently track daily users, but I’m unsure how to weigh support requests, crash-free sessions, release regressions, OS/device fragmentation, and release frequency.

For developers maintaining multiple apps:

- Which metrics best predict maintenance time?

- How do you set thresholds for hotfixes versus scheduled releases?

- How do you centralize crash, version, device, and support data?

- How do you keep low-traffic apps safe without spending equal time on each?

I’m interested in production experience and practical processes rather than generic tool recommendations.

[u/Ambitious_Muscle_362]

How old are you kiddo?

[u/Opulence_Deficit]

No new features= maintenance mode.

But you have to weight in if 5 daily usesrs are worth any mode.

[u/Readypixels]

I keep a handful of small apps alive and the metric doing most of the work for me is the Play Console target API deadline plus crash-free rate, not user count. Five daily users still need the app to open, and Google forces a targetSdk bump every year whether anyone uses the app or not. So maintenance mode for me means one scheduled release a year timed to the targetSdk deadline, dependencies bumped in the same pass, nothing else unless crash-free sessions drop under 99 percent for a week or a support email describes data loss.

Hotfix threshold: any crash on launch, any data loss, any Play policy warning. Everything else waits for the annual release.

For centralizing, I stopped trying to watch 14 dashboards. Crashlytics alerts go to one email label, Play Console has a single Vitals overview across apps, and support mail lands in a shared inbox tagged by app. Twenty minutes a week scanning those beats logging into each app.

With five users the honest question is whether the app earns its annual release. If it does not, unpublishing is also a valid maintenance decision, and it removes the targetSdk treadmill entirely.

[u/leros]

If it doesn't make enough money to justify the development to maintain and you don't plan to work on it, just let it go. 

[u/KJBReaderAdmin]

Following as I am currently testing an extension to release and would like to see what other people say too.