The demand of mobile phones has been growing over time and now they have become an indispensable part of our life. All day long you surf on the phones, chat on whatsapp, listen to music, search for videos on YouTube and visit play stores etc.
With a huge market of around millions of users, the developers keep on updating their apps and products for the users to experience new and amazing things on the phone which are just a touch away. The mobile applications market is expected to have a tremendous breakthrough in its profits as well as market size by about 962.5%, all this between the years 2011 and 2017 only. Apart from this the industry is expected to reach a high of $100 billion dollars by the end of year 2020.
Application development has seen many trends over the years with new features, ease of accessibility (not only via but on devices like smart cars, connected homes too) etc. Over past year usage and development of cloud based application has grown in importance. Along with this the ability to sync your devices and sharing of data is another platform in application development which has seen many innovations.
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The companies have also adopted the ideology that mobile first is no longer an ideology, but it is proving to be a necessary requirement of today’s generation. Above all, this the developers need to update their features according to what is trending too. The year 2017 has seen some new apps come into the light. The emergence of these technologies from the traditional ones have transformed the market and the entire world for the better. There is a list of mobile app trends which are going to be on the top list for some time now. Some of these are listed below:
Change brought in by the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP’s)
Faster is always better. AMP has been on the rise now as it aims at better ad performances via early results. This has changed the perspective of the Search engine optimisation (SEO) sector as well as web based application sectors. This has proven beneficiary to at least 80% of the publishers in terms of their viewing rates. AMP is an initiative of Google, which result in faster loading and less bouncing of AMP supported web applications.
Magic of Augmented and Virtual Reality
Augmented reality and Virtual reality have been revolutionizing the gaming as well as entertainment industry for quite some time now. They create magic by combining the real world and the virtual world to give the user an enhanced experience. AR games have been reigning the gaming sectors since the emergence of games such as Pokemon GO, sky siege, myNAV etc. and VR devices have made the entertainment sector take a new turn with devices like Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear, etc. These make sure that the users interest is captured completely.
VR and AR have tremendous potential in becoming a more revolutionary trend in the future market of applications. Thus wait for them to move your world to a new place.
Rise of Enterprise applications
Enterprise applications exist to make your life structured and well organized. They help you organize, manage important business process and do many more things anytime, anywhere. The successful example of an enterprise application is EVERNOTE. Using this people can collaborate multiple inputs from various devices for a single project. A huge market valuation of enterprise app is expected in the coming years.
Tackling security issues
There are a huge number of applications in the market which cannot pass the basic security tests. These applications were surveyed and major concern was found in places like insecure storage and privacy violation weaknesses of the apps. This is the one downcoming trend in mobile apps which hackers are exploiting more and more over the days for stealing confidential info. But to overcome this a trend in new and constantly improved security applications is observed.
Bringing life to Artificial Intelligence
The investment in AI is almost going to be tripled in the coming years. AI will provide a peek into new experiences via advanced analytics which the users have never experienced in previous years of mobile applications. More and more developers are now enabling AI features in their apps along with machine learning capabilities which are showing and will show great impact on the market.
Trends in Cloud based tech
Cloud based apps have found their way to the top because of their great ability to grab required data anytime, anyplace whenever required by the user by taking less space in your phone’s internal memory. Examples of these are many successful apps like Google drive, onedrive, dropbox etc. This trend looks like it is going to stay for another decade or so.
Cross platforms
With their being numerous variety of companies and their thousands and thousands of devices cross platforming is one trend which is never going to be off this list. Every developer needs to make sure that their apps work perfectly well in all sizes of screens and all the devices. Cloud tech. The trend has helped cross platforming a much easier and smooth transitory experience and without any disruptions too.
Rise of the Swift
Swift is the programming language developed by the iOS developers. Many of the other developers believe it to be much simpler than the traditional objective C language. Well, this language may not throw the empire of Objective C in just one day it surely is in the market with the aim of staying for a long long time.
M-Commerce the new standard of shopping
People have grown over credit and/debit cards and they have started using mobile apps like Google wallet and apple pay to make their payments or transactions nowadays. This is the driving force towards the age of M-commerce.
Wearable devices
Wearable devices like apple’s iWatch, google daydream view, etc. have definitely seen the light of the day and are now emerging out with some amazing tricks up its sleeve. These are now breaking the barriers of health care and medicinal purposes and are proving to be one of the most trending things this year.
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Location based services are taking a roll up
Applications like iBeacons from Apple and Beacon from Google are becoming more and more popular because of the fact that the dependency of apps on WiFi is now getting removed by them. This technology has some serious scope in the upcoming future.
Personalisation to retain users
The market of mobile applications is wide and still rising. An average user may use around 15 apps a week out of the many 65 apps downloaded by him. This shows that users will always choose to for the apps which fulfills their requirements i.e. which they feel are personalized and are best suited for them. Thus, many apps try to personalize themselves as much as possible to go with the trend.
IoT applications
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been aiming at connecting various devices since its birth. A survey said that around 26 billion devices will be connected by the year 2020. These smart objects vary from light bulbs, toys, controllable power sockets, medicare devices and what not. Smart phones and mobile applications will act as mediators in communicating to these smart objects.
Customer lead approach
The conventional predefined interactions between the users and the applications are breaking chains now with the customer lead approach in the market. Nowadays mobiles are providing us with completely different interaction methods. Instead of apps being the decision maker on when and how to do a particular task nowadays the interactions have changed and the users can now choose when and how to do a task with the guidance of the applications. This certainly has some potential in the near future of the mobile apps market.
Conclusion
Some of the next few years of ours and the mobile apps development are going to be transformed by the trends listed above for better or for worse. But some of them have started showing great potential already while others have just joined the race. Trending apps are our companions for a long time and they will remain the same too. The market for mobile applications provides us with easy and simplified solutions to our everyday needs and problems. Thus an application’s popularity is nowadays governed by a factor where it is seen how much of today’s trend is enclosed within the app.
Read also: Must-Have Tools to Build Mobile Apps
Even when there are so many trends that can be observed in the mobile applications, the aim always remains the same and that is giving the users best in class, smooth and amazing experiences. To be the center of these trends you need to stand out in terms of best designing skills and understanding of customers. The best you prove to be at these, the rich and popular media can be created by you and this leads to any application becoming memorable and better than others. Let’s hope to see some more trends in this sector with loads of innovation and best in class services.
