Can you spend a day without your smartphone? I can hardly imagine it.
Could we imagine about 10 years ago that we would use smartphones and tablets every day, everywhere for almost everything: playing games, ordering taxi, watching tv, ordering food, etc? Possibly, not.
The mobile application industry is growing increasingly fast. Its almost beginning of 2016 and its time to speak about top mobile app development trends that will rock this year.
Cloud driven apps will be on top
Cloud is going to play a leading role for a number of mobile apps in 2016. The cloud gives the possibility to sync apps across multiple devices. As the number of people using multiple mobile devices ( smartphones, tablets, wearables) is on the rise, the cloud approach makes it easy for them to access any data from any channel. Also, thanks to the cloud, app developers can retain the small size of mobile apps.
Gartner.com predicts that by 2018 at least 30% of service-centric companies will move the majority of their ERP applications to the cloud.
Focus on Mobile apps security
We witnessed a great increase in information leaks and hacker attacks in 2015 that affected a lot of organizations from small companies to industry giants and government organizations. Reports just prove this fact, more than 75% of mobile applications would fail basic security tests in 2015.
This is horrible as many mobile applications store sensitive and personal information. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2016, more than 50% of global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud.
So security is a key principle mobile developers should focus on in 2016.
IOS has proved itself as the most secure platform. Android has always been claimed as a non-secure platform, however developers paid more attention to security issue in the latest Android versions.
Shift towards enterprise mobile applications
This trend of the year 2015 will continue to boost in 2016.
According to a survey conducted by Vision Mobile in the beginning of 2015 43% of developers working on enterprise apps were making more than $10,000 per month. In comparison, only 19% of the app developers focusing on consumer apps were making a similar income. The percentage of successful enterprise apps developers is double the percentage of consumer apps developers.
So it`s not a secret that mobile apps developers will focus more on enterprise applications development to generate more revenues
Internet of Things / IoT and wearables
We have seen a big increase in usage of wearable devices in 2015 and this trend will continue to boost in 2016 as well. Certainly, IoT is still in its infancy and its mostly consumer based at the moment, but itll be adopted for commercial as well as industrial use.
Wearable tech devices, such as Google Glass and iWatch, have already created a huge buzz in the market and are becoming more and more popular.
Analysts predict that IoT will be the next big technological breakthrough and more and more people will be connected to “Things” in the nearest future.
It means that mobile developers and entrepreneurs should be prepared for this trend and consider IoT and wearable technology while developing new applications.
Focus on swift programming
Swift, a relatively new programming language from Apple, has already gained quite a substantial popularity. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, claimed that this set of tools was downloaded more than 11 million times in the first month alone. Now, these numbers are bigger.
Swift is designed as both an application language and a systems language and gives the possibility to develop apps for iOS, OS X, watchOS, tvOS, and so on.
I`m sure we will hear more about Swift in 2016.
Vaster adoption of location based technology/ Beacon
Another great trend for mobile developers is beacon technology.
This technology has already revolutionized the shopping experience and is expected to be adopted by other domains other than retail for its location tracking benefits.
New cross platform tools
With the rise of wearable devices, smart TVs, mobile applications need to suit the requirement of multiple platforms and devices. Cross platform tools may be a good solution. Sencha, Titanium, Unity 3D, Cocos2D, PhoneGap, are already playing a big role in the mobile app development market. In 2016 we may see the emergence of new cross platform development tools.
So, this was a short list of mobile app development trends that will be on their rise in 2016. I`ll be happy to hear you opinion on the future of
mobile industry. What trends would you like to add to our list?
Anna Kozik
Business Development Manager
