Update your mobile SDKs! Why it matters and how to make it a habit 

In the fast-paced world of growth marketing, every edge counts. From customer engagement to analytics, the SDKs powering your app are the behind-the-scenes engines that keep everything running smoothly. But are you making the most of them? Regular SDK updates aren’t just about maintenance—they unlock new features, better performance, and more accurate data that can give your marketing team a serious advantage. When updates are built into your workflow, you’ll always be equipped with the latest tools to drive growth, optimize campaigns, and deliver seamless customer experiences.

For many developer teams, updating SDKs falls into the category of “we’ll get around to it”—and the time to actually do it never materializes. That introduces risk to your app’s performance, and leaves a lot of opportunities on the table. Updating all your SDKs on a regular cadence is crucial—and if you work it into your regular workflow, it’s entirely doable.

Think of updating SDKs like maintaining your car. You know you need to swing by the mechanic when the odometer hits 3,000 miles since your last oil change or if the check engine light comes on. Sure, you could keep driving along (possibly for a long time), but you’re headed toward potential major issues. With regular maintenance visits, you address routine wear and tear, avoid vulnerabilities, and improve performance. Regular SDK updates are much the same. With each update, you can ensure compatibility across systems, improve performance, boost security, and even gain access to new features and functionality.

Routine SDK updates, like routine car maintenance, will protect you and keep your application’s engine running smoothly. SDK updates are important for security, performance, feature enhancements, compatibility, and bug fixes. If you skip updates for too long, issues start to build up. Eventually, you’re faced with a mountain of issues you need to address all at once. In other words, an expensive and time-intensive mess.

Keeping your SDKs up to date isn’t just about maintaining stability—it’s also about unlocking new features that enhance your app’s functionality and user experience. SDK updates frequently include enhancements that give you access to improved tools, deeper integrations, and new ways to engage users. If you're not updating regularly, you could be missing out on valuable features that drive growth and retention.

For example, at Customer.io, we’re rolling out inline in-app messages on mobile, a powerful way to deliver embedded, real-time messaging directly within your app experience. However, to enable this feature, you must be using our iOS native SDK version 3.8.0 or higher. If you’ve kept your SDK updated incrementally, adopting this feature is seamless. But if you’ve skipped several versions, the process of upgrading could involve addressing multiple breaking changes at once, delaying your ability to take advantage of new functionality.

By staying current with your SDKs, you eliminate unnecessary barriers to adopting the latest innovations. This means your team can move faster, test new engagement strategies sooner, and ensure your app is always leveraging the best tools available to enhance the user experience.

Keeping your SDKs up to date ensures your app benefits from ongoing performance and reliability enhancements—without extra effort on your part. A recent example from our Customer.io Android SDK (version 4.5.3) highlights why regular updates matter. With the latest Android OS update, new restrictions limited what apps could do when running in the background. As a result, our SDK could not immediately track when a push notification was delivered, delaying real-time engagement insights until the user reopened the app. In version 4.5.3, we addressed this by ensuring the delivered metric is sent immediately when the push reaches the device, even while the app remains in the background. This kind of update—seamlessly improving tracking accuracy, engagement insights, and overall reliability—is exactly why staying current is so valuable.

Keeping your SDKs up to date regularly helps prevent major issues by ensuring each update is a small, manageable change—rather than a massive overhaul. When you skip multiple updates and eventually need to jump from one major version to another, you introduce a higher risk of bugs and breaking changes. If something goes wrong, debugging becomes significantly harder because so much has changed at once—it’s like trying to find a single faulty wire after rewiring an entire house.

By making incremental updates, you reduce this risk. Each minor or patch update typically includes small, well-documented changes, making it easier to spot and resolve any issues. Major updates, on the other hand, often introduce larger architectural changes, deprecations, or breaking API modifications that require more time and effort to integrate. Staying current means you’re always working with the latest security patches, compliance updates, and performance improvements, without the stress of untangling a web of outdated dependencies.

Regular updates don’t just protect your app from bugs—they make your development process smoother, more predictable, and easier to manage in the long run.

There are plenty of reasons to maintain updated SDKs. So why doesn’t everyone do it? Often, it’s simply a sense of having too much to do and not enough time. Compounding that issue is the fact that teams don’t often recognize the ROI of regular SDK updates—making them more likely to fall to the bottom of the priority list. But you can overcome those barriers with some thoughtful planning and a recognition of why SDK updates add value.

It’s easy to put SDK updates on the back burner because teams aren’t clear on the developer time required. With limited hours available, developers often leave routine maintenance until too late and don’t set aside enough time to tackle these tasks. Or they fall into the trap of assuming every update will require lots of effort, and therefore skip ones that aren’t actually very time-consuming at all.

Overcoming time limitations means understanding the lift associated with different updates and factoring it into your workflows.

At Customer.io, as with most SDK providers, we follow semantic versioning, which helps you understand at a glance how much effort an update might require. Semantic versioning follows the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format (e.g., 4.2.2), where:

• Patch updates (e.g., 4.2.3 → 4.2.4) contain small fixes and require almost no effort.
• Minor updates (e.g., 4.2.2 → 4.3.0) introduce new features but remain backward compatible, making them easy to implement.
• Major updates (e.g., 4.2.2 → 5.0.0) include breaking changes, meaning your developers may need to adjust your app’s code before upgrading.

For all major updates, Customer.io publishes a clear upgrade guide to help your team smoothly transition with minimal friction. By keeping your SDKs up to date, you can take advantage of the latest features and improvements while minimizing the risk of technical debt or compatibility issues.

What’s working right now may not work forever. However, many stakeholders struggle to determine whether an update is worth the effort if their app is working at the moment—taking an “if it’s not broken, why fix it” approach.

To change this mindset, take a look at the impact of SDK updates on your app, including how they affect performance and the opportunities they present.

Whenever you’re alerted to a new SDK version, take a moment to review the changelog. You should get a clear picture of the risks and rewards—issues you’ll face if you don’t update, and the new opportunities you’ll unlock if you do.

At Customer.io, for example, our changelogs make it easy to understand the ROI of updating SDKs. You can select your current SDK version and see all the changes, giving you a clear picture of new features and stability improvements. The changelogs also show what features would break without the update, including less immediately obvious (but still critical) features.

The time you dedicate to your SDK updates doesn’t have to interrupt your development cycle. Instead, it should be a natural part of it, integrated into your overall workflow. The average application uses 14 to 18 SDKs and integrations, all of which need routine updating. Take an inventory of all the SDKs you use, and incorporate updates into your existing workflow so everything is always up to date.

Set monthly or quarterly “SDK refresh” sprints. For efficiency, bundle minor changes and include them in your regular sprints. They should only take a few minutes, and can be part of your regular release process.

Major updates should get their own epics, since they might take a couple hours of dedicated attention. Adding these tasks to your backlog with a link to the upgrade guide will help you reserve the time needed and demonstrate the work’s ROI. 

Like any other project, your SDK update process should be strategically designed for success. That means involving the right parties at the right time for collaborative effort.

Establish a collaborative process among three key parties:

• A designated owner: Designate a single person to be responsible for tracking new releases and initiating the update process. Crucially, empower this person with the authority they need to champion the process and move it forward.
• Mobile development teams: Your mobile development teams should have a process to check for updates regularly, working in sync with any other stakeholders.
• Marketing and product teams: Sometimes, SDK updates unlock features your marketing team can use. For any platform that marketing has a strong stake in (like Customer.io), establish a process for marketing and developer teams to collaboratively monitor SDK updates and look for new features they can use.

Naturally, the first step in updating your SDKs is knowing when to do so. This can be a nuisance when your team uses more than 10 SDKs, but luckily, there are tools and practices that can help.

• Automate notifications and dependency checkers: Tools like Dependabot or Renovate can immediately alert you to version updates. You can also use custom scripts to detect version changes. Whatever path you choose, set up automation and be sure alerts are going to someone empowered to take action (like your designated SDK updates owner).
• CI/CD pipelines: Use automated tests in Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions to verify each build with new dependencies, helping you avoid errors without excessive manual labor.

We’re all guilty of taking the tl;dr approach sometimes. But when it comes to SDK updates, a quick skim of the release notes just won’t do. One of the biggest mistakes teams make is missing important changes or depreciation warnings that were in the notes.

Consider having your designated SDK owner read the release notes thoroughly and provide a summary of key highlights to all stakeholders—flagging both potential issues and promising new opportunities.

Communication is a significant part of seizing on opportunities presented by SDK updates. It’s also a meaningful way to keep your teams in sync and efficient. Be sure to communicate beyond your developer teams—marketing, sales, and customer success teams can also benefit from staying in the loop.

SDK changes can be communicated through three essential avenues:

• Internal changelogs: Use your changelogs and release notes to summarize what’s changed and highlight new/removed features and bug fixes. Remember that this info isn’t just relevant to developers—share these with marketing, customer success, and other teams who have a stake in product changes.
• Team syncs: Team syncs, sprint demos, and standups are great opportunities to discuss new features, opportunities, and impacts from SDK updates. Cross-team syncs are especially valuable after major updates that unlock new features relevant to marketing teams.
• Documentation: Finally, be sure to update your internal documentation with details about the current version and integration details so all developers have the most up-to-date reference info.

Of course, like all development work, it doesn’t end when you push the code live. Build routine testing into your update cadence. Set up automated testing before you deploy an SDK update, and pay particular attention to the performance of any key features you’re using.

After deployment, look for warning signs that an SDK update has been mishandled. If any of your engagement analytics plummet after an update, it’s a sign that something may be broken. When updating mobile SDKs, it’s worth keeping a close eye on push success rates in particular. If there are code changes combined with an SDK update, it could cause some metrics to go unreported (especially if new third-party libraries that may also offer push notifications are installed).

Updating the SDKs in your app is only the first step. After you release your update, you need your customers to upgrade to the latest version of your application to take advantage of the improvements (and avoid potential issues).

Ensure your communication strategy includes outreach to motivate people to update (in-app messages are a great way to do this!) and clearly highlight the benefits of taking a moment to install the latest version. This is yet another area where collaboration between developer and marketing teams is key!

Routine car maintenance keeps your car running at peak performance—and saves you time and money in the long run. Regular SDK updates are the same. If you don’t address them regularly, you’re more likely to experience the catastrophic “haven’t been to the mechanic in years, so everything is breaking at once” effect.

You likely have lots of SDKs to keep current. If you haven’t updated your SDKs in a while, now’s the time to get things up to date—and keep them that way. Why not start with Customer.io? Here are three steps you can take right now:

• Sign up for regular release notes for our mobile SDKs
• Check out our latest platform release notes (updated monthly!)
• Review our SDK documentation and make sure your integration is up to date