A report from Gartner predicts that “market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them, by the end of 2017.” However, it is also true that competition is on the rise and enterprises expect more sophistication in their mobile apps. So you just can’t create a mobile app on the cheap anymore.
To take advantage of the rising demand for ‘quality’ mobile apps, the developers have to deploy new technologies that will not only bring agility and flexibility to the app development process, but also lead to significant improvement in the quality of the final product.
Think about the following stats
➤ According to a Flurry Analytics Research, the typical US mobile consumers invest 86 percent of their “smartphone-time” on apps. The research discovered that smartphone users spend around 2 hours and 42 minutes on average on mobile phones, from which app usage commands 2 hours and 19 minutes.
➤ Since May 2014, mobile phones account for virtually 60 percent of the total digital media time spent and 51 percent of that time was represented by app usage.
➤ Nielsen report suggests that smartphone users invest around 89 percent of their media time in mobile apps, and the continuing to be 11 percent on mobile web.
➤ Provided these stats, it is evident that mobile apps are all set to make ubiquitous presence in the coming days. it is important to stay upgraded about the most current trends in the mobile app development landscape, however also capture the future patterns well in advance to survive the marketplace competition.
Here are some predictions regarding mobile app development in 2016 that the developers must be mindful of:
1. IoT and Mobile App Integration- Enterprises in key verticals such as healthcare, payments, automotive and energy will start experimenting with Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 2016. Such efforts are going to require adoption of a more complex mobile integration platforms, which will entail massive modernization of enterprise backend infrastructure to ensure that the data is available to all devices.
2. Cross-Platform Mobile App Development- Their continued popularity of mobiles in the workplace will lead to increased demand for cross-platform mobile solutions that help mobile workers transition back and forth between a desktop environment and mobile devices, The expectation will be to use the same applications with the same power, look and feel, to perform their tasks and manage and visualize massive amounts of data no matter what the screen size
3. Cloud-Driven Apps-By making optimal usage of cloud Technology, developers can retain the small size of mobile apps while having the facility of syncing their apps across multiple devices. Such technologies are now having greater demand because of the rise of wearable tech. Cloud makes it much easier to deal with bandwidth and any memory issues.
4. Mobile CRM and Wearable Tech- As per Gartner's recent report, Mobile and social will soon be integrated seamlessly into CRM platforms and 40 percent of sales organizations will rely primarily on mobile digital technology for their sales automation initiatives by 2020. as the trend rate and focus of mobile/wearable technology increasing there are chances that this day would come sooner even before the time predicted.
5. IoT and Data Visualization- With IoT becoming a reality for enterprises, there is now the need for solutions to visualize large sets of complex data. All the data that is generated by scores of connected devices must be presented in a format that is easily accessible to all the stakeholders so that decisions can be taken more efficiently and transparently. The mobile apps could be performing the task of data collection and presentation.
6. App Security Comes At The Fore- The stringent security protocols are fairly reasonable, considered that apps today are progressively saving individual and extremely delicate information including bank details and SSN of the user. Any type of security spaces can result in hacking and information leakages, which has actually currently been a significant focus for app developers this year in 2016.There is no way that security spaces in mobile applications should be neglected if it is present in the app shops.
7. Location-based Services- Beacon and location-based services have already gained awareness among several businesses. These services will introduce a new world of possibilities for many prospects that help to interact with potential customers. Lately, the retail businesses have adopted this technology vastly. They use it to deliver the right information at the right place as customers walk by. We can expect that this trend will continue to gain force this year and will spread largely into various businesses.
8. Consumerization of Enterprise Apps- In Today’s mobile-first world, user experience plays the central role because of which all enterprise app are being revolutionized to give it a look of consumer applications unlike earlier time where app were built primarily on the foundation of strong engineering and secondary on design.This trend continued all through 2015 and is expected to conclude by the end of 2016 drastically changing the way enterprise softwares will be used.
9. Mobile Centers of Excellence- To see improved development efficiency, scalability and mobile success, many large enterprises are using mobile center of excellence, which enables multiple stakeholders from lines of business and IT to work together on mobile app development. More organizations should establish a mobile center of excellence and start reaping the benefits of greater collaboration through centralizing mobile best practice and bringing the business and IT together to achieve common goals.
10. More Mobile App Personalization- Employees accept that it's easier to do jobs when they can access work remotely from a mobile device, mobile reinvention of time-consuming tasks is a good way to improve the employee experience, it’s important to commit to mobile app personalization over mobile app saturation to drive higher adoption of tools and customer engagement in the field.
The mobile app development industry is set to see a great number of major shifts in 2016, which will completely redefine the app landscape as we know it. Savvy development companies are already starting to prepare for the many changes investing into better security, new programming skills, and the IoT approach. But for now, suffice it to say that 2016 will bring both great opportunity for improving app development.