Future of Mobile Development: 10 Trends That Will Take Over

The future of mobile apps is more than optimistic, considering that both businesses and individual users prefer accessing the benefits of modern technologies via their mobile devices.

Whether you’re researching to build a corporate mobile app as an internal product to boost your business process efficiency or are ready to rock the global market with a mobile startup, it will be useful to learn about technological trends and modern users’ expectations. 

If an app you have previously released tends to get deleted by the users month after download, poor functionality and weak user engagement may not be a key reason for failure. It can happen that some users’ device capacities are not enough to demonstrate your app’s best performance. The users are keen to delete their apps when they are running out of storage space. 

Cloud-based mobile apps arose as a solution to this kind of problem. The future of mobile apps lies in cloud computing because this technology enables data storage and processing in a way that doesn’t depend on the power of the user’s device.

Cloud-based apps are completely safe, scalable, and cost-effective to develop. This is the best solution for cross-platform development.
Cloud computing takes the lead role among the future mobile app development technologies because it creates the basis for using IoT and 5G, which, in turn, provides unseen device connectivity and the real high speed of data processing.

Who would mind having a remote control for their domestic appliances right on a mobile device? Being powered by cloud computing, IoT creates a manageable interconnected network of devices that can effectively exchange abnormal masses of real-time data. 

The potential of IoT mobile apps is not limited to the security and automation functions for smart homes. IoT apps are already spread widely across different industries from healthcare to manufacturing and supply chains as effective business management tools. IoT mobile applications help avoid or reduce downtime, monitor loads, track conditions of both flesh-and-blood patients and cold steel equipment.

IoT technologies bring business automation to a whole new level by optimizing not only business processes themselves but the whole working ecosystem. That’s how it goes: smart homes, smart vehicles, smart working environments, smart cities. According to Statista, the number of active connections in the smart cities is expected to reach 53.63 million by 2025 in the EU only.

5G disrupts the future of mobile app development in a way that many mobile app developers were dreaming of for years. Due to its incredible speed, 5G optimizes mobile app load speed and overall responsiveness with no additional effort from the developer’s side. In connection with cloud computing, it creates an ability for unlimited scaling and adding new functions to a mobile app with no risk of weakening performance indicators.
Many industries, already using augmented reality and other benefits of the connectivity principle, are ready to accept 5G possibilities as new standards for data transferring.

M-commerce is the most ‘old’ and well-established trend that shapes the future of mobile apps. Even if we don’t consider online shopping itself, we see that people use their mobile devices as shopping assistants. In the earlier stages of mobile commerce trend development, buyers were using their mobile phones for pre-purchase research and price comparison. Before the Corona Crisis, up to 80% of global mobile devices users’ were buying at least 1 item per 6 months with their phones. Quarantine measures significantly boosted this tendency. Users now are more open to exploring different retailers' mobile apps, and they do it way more often than they did before the isolation period. Statista’s report on mobile retail app usage in 2020 illustrates this tendency.

M-Commerce popularity is also stimulated by other technological trends like online payments or virtual reality that help to provide users with an exceptional shopping experience. 

Business and software environments become more and more complex, growing the number of data sources and overall integrations. It means that quality management challenges are growing at the same pace as opportunities. Application performance management tools help businesses match technical quality metrics with user analytics to make more strategic improvements. APM tools also help developers to implement more holistic quality testing approaches.

Artificial intelligence is shaping the future of mobile application development by adding meaningful value to both business and customer apps. AI and machine learning algorithms had already proved their efficiency in data recognition, processing, and predictive analysis.
Businesses of various industries implement AI to automate the customer onboarding process, straighten security measures, adopt predictive maintenance and make more accurate predictions.

The future of apps powered by AI is determined by its ability to deliver ultra-personalized user experiences through all levels of customer-business interactions.

Aren’t you already able to measure your heart rate with your smartwatches? Some models can even call you an ambulance near the risk of a heart stroke, but it's only a beginning. We’ll have more and more wearable gadgets such as smart jewelry or clothes that need to transfer and process sensor data via mobile applications. The data received from the sensors can be used for scientific purposes such as patient monitoring and diagnostics or finding clues on how to create healthier products. The wearables mobile app future is conditioned by users’ desires for self micro-management. Most of these apps are already aimed at providing information that helps people improve efficiency in lifestyle-related day-to-day tasks.

AR & VR technologies help creative users to match their imagination with the conditions of actual reality to project it most accurately. It’s very beneficial in industrial automation as it helps plan optimal production levels through Digital Twin simulations and have access to the exact digital copy of manufacturing areas updated in real-time.
However, AR & VR technologies have the highest adoption degree in the entertainment sector. It’s commonly used in gaming and streaming. Next, go to the fashion industry and interior design.
Features of AR/VR apps can include scanning and measuring objects, adding effects to them, etc.

In the future of app development, chatbots are seen not only as a tool for customer support but more like multifunctional user assistants. Chatbots benefit from AI and machine learning since it enables them to perform more complex tasks related to language processing, voice and image recognition, or even sentiment analysis.
This kind of assistance doesn’t necessarily include a visual chatbot. It changes the way of how a user interacts with the mobile app.

Blockchain is seen as a secure and transparent backbone for the future of mobile development. It’s already widely used in fintech and trading apps, but blockchain potential is not limited by any industry specifics. Its value lies in principles of decentralization, transparency, and immutability of transactional data. Thus, any business from a pharma company to a supply chain or peer-to-peer lending platform can use blockchain to ensure that transactions they share cannot be changed or faked.

In-demand applications now use AI & Machine learning algorithms, are running in the cloud, and deliver a personalized user experience. The most popular apps, for now, are the ones that are used for online payments, shopping, and delivery services.

The future of mobile app development on the iOS platform is shaping by advanced technologies like Cloud Computing, AI&Machine learning, and IoT. The Internet of Things encourages iOS developers to embrace SwiftUI for programming as it works on multiple apple devices.

Artificial Intelligence implementation will help create even more personalized user experiences and enrich apps’ functionality with voice and image recognition and language processing. It also brings security levels to a new height by applying smart ML algorithms for fraud detection and prevention. AI can help with 100% automation of some business processes like customer onboarding.

The growth in mobile device accessibility and limitations provoked by pandemic are stimulating the future of mobile development as never before, speeding up wide adoption for innovations. All of the listed technologies were around for a couple of years and had proved their feasibility and efficiency on the projects of leading technology companies. Nobody is questioning if the implementation of new technology is worth it anymore. Businesses only want to know where to start with these innovations and mobile development can be a good initial point.

Mobile startups should take all the future tendencies into account because it’s the only way to compete and satisfy the needs and expectations of modern users, who are becoming pickier due to abundant app options available on the market. 

If you’re ready to embrace all opportunities but still looking for some guidance on how to match your mobile app functionality with business goals —feel free to contact Dataxdev’s experts. We’re experienced mobile app development partners who are ready to dedicate both our minds and hands to bring your idea to life.