How to Keep Your App Dependencies Up-To-Date?

What are the challenges and how to automate maintenance properly?

Photo by fahrulazmi on Unsplash

One aspect of software development is often overlooked: maintaining dependencies. I won’t lie, for a long time, it was the case for me and my teams.

Why spend time on maintenance?

Keeping out-of-date dependencies will not only create incompatibilities, or look uncool. It raises two huge issues: security and performance.

Remember the Equifax breach? Well, that’s a $425M settlement that could have been avoided, but how? René Gielen, vice president of Apache Struts, says:

Most breaches we become aware of are caused by failure to update software components that are known to be vulnerable for months or even years

Yes, maintaining dependencies also has a huge impact on performance. A use-case with React Native navigation is a good example. It shows how the newest version brings higher performance but also helps to improve code quality.