Everybody loves new stuff. Entering an unknown world and opening boxes to new adventures is always exciting. 2018 brings with it a whole stack of trends that are going to shape our daily life. Especially the new mobile app development trends.
Here in Barcelona, we have a great and healthy technology ecosystem that, every year, brings us cutting-edge trends and helps to improve our tech Hub.
2017 was a phenomenal year for app development, moving from 2012 with a total of 57.33 billion apps downloaded, we rose to a max of 254 billion last year. A fact that makes companies and organisations realise that mobile apps are no longer a chance to increment their market strategy, but a must part of it.
“Large companies (retailers, banks, hospitality, etc.) are using mobile applications for branding, increasing customer engagement, direct marketing, etc., while small and midsize businesses are also following the mobile trend and creating their own apps”, claims Crysberry.com.
We list here the top 8 mobile app development trends that, from our perspective, will be the foundation for all mobile strategies.
1. Internet of Things (IoT) and Wearables
The concept of smart cities, homes, cars and smart health is spreading, industrial IoT, retail and the overall “smart concept” is growing very fast.
IoT apps will start to gain traction by the end of this year. It is predicted that the integration of IoT with automation technology will be a big trend in mobile app development this year. A growth of $661.74 billion in revenues is predicted by 2021, with 50 million mobile devices connected by 2020, according to Statista.
2. Artificial Intelligence
Personalised commerce and chatbots are a great value for any type of organisation. Learning about your users is great and A.I gives you the advantage and chance of giving recommendations to your customers based on their behaviour.
Companies are starting to implement it in mobile strategies and soon they will start to synchronise their apps with Facebook Messenger Bots.
3. A.R / V.R Apps
There is a whole other article that we wrote, where we exposed the growth and future for these two realities and the merging of both of them, called Mixed Reality.
According to Digi-Capital, by 2020, AR/VR could hit $150 billion, with AR taking around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
The industry of Virtual and Augmented reality is developing and pivoting to scenarios beyond gaming and entertainment.
Augmented Reality is going to be implemented more in the retail sector, healthcare, engineering and real estate. This is a technology that has the added value of giving the consumer an “experience” that they will remember. And as we know, experience is one of the main factors in marketing and sales. As for Virtual Reality, it will keep being implemented in the events and gaming industries.
Statista claims that by 2019, there will be over 5 billion AR mobile applications.
4. Security
This aspect has become a very trendy and tricky part of all the new technology tools from the industry. Due to up-to-date development methodologies, hackers have been able to break into the personal lives of people, take their data and use it to their benefit. Because of that, there is a whole industry behind security, with systems, processes, organisations and controls designed to protect these systems and data from cyberattacks.
5. Cloud-based
One of the main issues that appears when having a mobile device is the quantity of memory that is used when downloading and installing different apps. It adds a lot of data to your device and usually that directly affects its speed. Often you are forced to uninstall those apps to make it work better.
With cloud-based apps, this problem is solved, since it uses cloud servers and the information is saved there.
Mobile traffic on cloud-based apps is expected to rise by 90% until the year 2019.
6. Instant Apps
With this feature of the Android platform, their users will be able to enjoy an app without actually fully downloading it, providing the tools so that users only load the part of the content they need. They function just like Native apps, and can attract more people with their convenience. All borders are removed between app and website.
This allows you to save space in your smartphone, there is no need to install the part of the app that you are not going to use.
7. AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
The faster your mobile app is, the bigger an advantage you have. AMP allows mobile users to load pages a lot quicker. Google has been one of the first to implement a special search box for their users for mobile-friendly website.
Some of the benefits that you will get from implement AMP are:
- Increased visitors;
- Higher CTR;
- Increased AD visibility;
- Easy visitors analysis;
- Fewer migration efforts;
- Easy content placement;
- No sitemap required;
- Mobile Search Index;
- Mobile Search Carousel
List provided by crysberry.com
8. Payment
The last app development trend on our list is payment. It has become. along with security, a very trendy topic for digital technology.
One technology mainstream in this sector that changed payment methods is Blockchain, but it isn’t the only one. People have always used the traditional Credit Card/Bank Account system to do transactions, however with the newest and securest Apple Pay and Google Wallet, customers are starting to shift to them.
Author:
David Ayza Enero is a Marketing Manager at Apiumhub, a software development company specialised in software architecture and web & app development. He is passionate about new technologies and sports and his hobby is writing articles and sharing knowledge about new technologies, methodologies in the industry and their diverse applications.