Famous service for statistics, Sensor Tower, reports App Store’s 2017 revenue to be $38.5 billion, and Google Play – $20.1 billion ($58.7 billion combined).
Consequentially, the amount of mediocre products released in the mobile world has quadrupled. The market is full of copycats, bloatware, and apps that simply weren’t interesting enough to rise above the crowd.
How then can you make sure that your mobile app dresses for success? One proven way is to create what you love and catch a favorable trend to push you forward.
Apple has recently reported 2 factors that have energized the growth: App Store makeover and the new breed of AR apps, like Pokémon Go. In other words, this means improving UI/UX and giving the users more of what they love – which is currently AR/VR applications.
According to Statista, AR/VR will hit around $140 billion market size by 2020. No wonder that both Google and Apple have invested heavily in their own AR projects – ARKit and ARCore. Augmented reality is potentially an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and with the necessary technology now available, it’s going to make a roar in 2018.
Connecting real-world objects to the internet in order to enable remote control, automation, and monitoring is no longer a science fiction. Just as you read this, IoT applications are revolutionizing construction, energy, transportation, retail, healthcare, and many other industries.
IoT sensors are capable of amazing things. And what can be a better way to collect and present actionable data than a mobile app? A majority of consumer IoT networks already rely on mobile devices.
Modern on-the-go lifestyle has no place for slow websites. No wonder that Google cares about web performance so much that they have dedicated a whole project for it called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
AMP HTML, JS and Cache enables web pages to load faster on mobile. AMP is much more than mere lazy loading, but lazy loading is one of the key concepts. It is a must-have feature for the desktop websites too. Lazy loading ensures that your visitors see content as soon as possible, even before the page loads completely.
Google is already featuring AMP-enabled websites on top of all the other search results. 2018 will push AMP even further.
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are changing the way software operates more than you can imagine. Think about chatbots, recommendation engines, behavioral marketing, personalized experience – many modern app features would be impossible without AI.
Of course, AI development is still a very expensive and complicated process. However, with the modern availability of technology like Facebook Messenger Platform, bots are already easier to integrate. Currently, there is only a handful of apps doing this, but we will definitely see more of them in the future.
Wearable software is now what mobile apps were 5 years ago – an untapped yet tremendous potential for business development. Smartwatches and other connected wearables are already a trend, but in the coming years, we will see even more of such devices.
Our company is one of the first developers that has entered Android Wear market. We know exactly how much it takes and gives to work with wearables – our watch faces project currently has over 150K total installs and keeps growing.
And while Android Wear on its own is a very capable and promising platform, Apple and Samsung smartwatch markets are growing even faster. There’s also a still-young eyewear market that is closely related to the AR apps niche.
Blockchain technology is much more than a simply cryptocurrency driver. Mobile payments (like BitPay), version control (GitHub is very close to that), and smart contracts – all of those features can be powered (often uniquely) by blockchain.
For example, have you ever thought of blockchain as a part of supply chain security system? Blockchain can enable secure and authenticated data collection, which is especially important on mobile.
Speaking of mobile payments, have you noticed how many “Pay” apps are already out there? Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal Mobile, and now officially – Google Pay.
This logically compliments the rise of eCommerce apps and produces new payment mechanisms. Example – scan and pay system provided by Samsung. 2018 will see more apps integrating new payment methods.
As a result, developers have to pay more attention to enterprise mobile apps’ security. This means looking for smarter ways to manage authorization and encryption of data.
It’s easier and often cheaper to rent a server space, rather than installing your own, which easily explains a booming success of services like AWS. More and more companies are using on-demand cloud servers for everything from website hosting to video streaming.
According to Cisco, 86% of mobile traffic data is already processed in the cloud, and this number will reach 90% by 2019. Meanwhile, non-cloud traffic (like direct file sharing and file/app downloading) is constantly decreasing.
Cloud services provide increased reliability, performance, and security for mobile apps. They also allow better data collection and analytics.
We can help you navigate through all of the current market trends and technical innovations effectively! Contact us today to find out how our solutions can help your business succeed.