Mobile apps used to be considered just an optional addition to a company’s marketing strategy, but that’s not the case anymore. Given the fact that today mobile apps are one of the main ways to build brand awareness and increase sales, they have become a necessity when it comes to developing a business. And that’s not all! These apps have become part of our daily lives and we don’t even realize anymore that we use them for almost everything that we do. With that being said, we can only expect for these apps to become even more present in our lives. So here are five mobile app development trends for 2018:
There’s no doubt that both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality have really taken the industry by storm last year and will definitely continue to do so in 2018. According to Dot Com Info way, the total number of mobile apps with built-in AR capabilities will cross 1580 million in 2018. Maybe the main reason why these technologies have really taken over is that of how important customer experience has become in recent years. AR will really make a difference when it comes to industries such as healthcare, real estate, engineering, while VR will be more present in the gaming industry and in technology-based companies.
According to Gartner, since 2016, more and more companies have started to use custom mobile app development services, in order to help them grow their business and increase their sales. These companies don’t create such apps only for interacting with the customers, but also for interacting with the business. That means there are custom made apps out there meant to serve for organizational purposes, such as tracking employee vacation time or approvals and enrollments.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is currently a big influencer in all technology-related industries, and the mobile app industry is no exception. Huge industries such as education, smart health, automotive or smart homes have been impacted by IoT and mobile apps have already jumped on the bandwagon too. Just think about Hive, an app that allows you to control all the home’s utilities from your mobile device. Just to give you a hint of how influential IoT is, the number of connected devices is expected to rise to 23.14 billion in 2018.
This relatively new technology is considered to be the future of mobile apps, with more and more companies investing in researching and developing this field. Technologies such as natural language processing, knowledge representation or vision and speech recognition are currently being used in numerous mobile apps. But what the future holds is even greater than that, with AI branches such as Neural Networks or Deep Machine Learning being heavily researched right now. Considering the importance of customer-friendly application lately, more and more businesses want to use AI algorithms for their apps, in order to make them think, reason, listen and talk like humans.
This area is always a big challenge for developers and designers. Developing apps for wearable devices such as smart glasses or smart watches is definitely different from developing apps for smartphones and tablets. But in spite of that, wearable technology is becoming one of the fastest growing markets in the field of app development. If we’re talking about the future of wearable devices, we’re not necessarily talking about smart glasses and smart watches, because it’s been a while since those came out. These devices will impact tourism, fashion, finance and the automotive industry and they will definitely impact our lives and change the way we do normal daily stuff.