I've developed a couple of apps that only required a few hours a year essential maintenance. The biggest obstacles have been with being forced to upgrade librar

I've developed a couple of apps that only required a few hours a year essential maintenance. The biggest obstacles have been with being forced to upgrade libraries to work with changes to third party APIs (e.g. payment APIs, ad APIs), upgrades to do with OS changes (e.g. new versions of Android) and applying security patches to dependencies. To decrease maintenance, generally you want to reduce your dependence on external services that might change, minimise the use of complex third party libraries that might have security problems later, and keep your app as simple as you can to reduce the chance of bugs. It's hard to predict what changes are going to be required for a given ecosystem (e.g. Android, Mac, Chrome Web Store, web browsers) so sometimes it's a matter of luck unless you can guarantee the OS, hardware, APIs etc. are never going to change. I'm currently working on a Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io https://www.checkbot.io) that doesn't require a lot of essential maintenance besides keeping up with changes Google have been making to make extensions more secure. Bracing myself for what breaking Manifest v3 changes are announced.