Staying Abreast of Mobile App Development Trends

Driven by advancements in technology, mobile app development has become one of the most innovative and actively growing sectors. In the past few years, there has been an explosive growth in the number of mobile apps in iTunes and Google Play Store. With the number of mobile apps in the market hitting new heights, competition has also increased. It has become necessary for companies to work with developers who stay abreast of latest mobile app development trends.

Here are some of the trends in app development that will not only take this industry by storm but also determine the future of mobile app development:

1. The Web App landscape is changing with accelerated mobile pages (AMP). Recently, it was announced by Google that there will be separate search indexes for mobile web. This will prove to be a revolutionary step for this sector especially from the Web app and SEO perspective. It might end up changing the mobile app development trends completely.

2. The market will get flooded with more of wearable and IoT applications. The wearable device category according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) will see a composite annual growth rate of 20.3%. These devices will need apps for managing, collecting, analyzing and presenting data in a readable format and this will result in a boom in this app category.

3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are two important mobile app development trends to watch out for. Even last year, AR (Games including iOnRoad, Pokemon Go, myNav and Sky Beige) as well as VR (VR devices such as Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear) gained tremendous popularity in the entertainment and gaming industry. According to the industry experts, AR will become more popular than VR in the coming years.

4. The focus on security will increase because most mobile apps focus on UX and UI but skip over security. According to the industry experts, app developers will have to adopt certain practices to ensure security of mobile apps in enterprises. They will have to avoid storing sensitive data in unencrypted form, detect data leakage by analyzing apps during and after use, verify the transmission of data over SSL by the apps and so on.

5. Innovative mobile user experience design will be another popular app development trend to watch out for. For a sound user experience, it is necessary to display data and content on the mobile user interface in an effective manner. Designers are coming up with apps with interactive content layers, cards, circular design patterns and manipulation of content. With these features, an “augmented reality” is created that allows users to interact with the content in a better way.

6. There will be a significant rise in cloud driven mobile apps. This technology has found its place in mobile app development. Today, powerful mobile apps are being created that fetch data directly from cloud and take minimum space in the internal memory of smartphones.

From advancement of micro-apps to M-commerce and location based service apps, there are several trends that will be seen in the mobile app development sector.