Seven trends revealing the future of mobile app development

【51CTO.com Quick Translation】 Undoubtedly, mobile application development is a growing and lucrative industry, with the value of mobile applications downloaded every year reaching 179 billion. While Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter have created the online social world, map apps, shopping apps, and payment apps have made our lives more convenient while saving a lot of time and money. Many reasons have pushed the mobile application development industry to a peak, and many mobile application companies are willing to pay a lot of money to have top developers build their applications.

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App developers not only help companies develop products, but also help companies enhance their brand image, increase customer engagement, assist in marketing, and more. Just like selling clothing and footwear, apps remove extra steps and push popular trends to everyone more directly. The success of mobile apps is not limited to a friendly browser or mobile website. For these reasons, mobile app development companies are very concerned about future development trends. Below we will explain the seven major trends in mobile app development in the future.

Trend 1: Wearable devices
According to IDC, 101.9 million wearable devices were sold in 2016, a 29% increase from 2015. The trend in the mobile APP industry is from basic technology smart devices to wearable devices. These application development companies are trying to extend personal networks from smartphones to wearable devices such as smart jewelry, watch technology, medical sensors, and other body gadgets embedded in clothing and footwear. These applications will be integrated with your smartphone.

Trend 2: Internet of Things
It is estimated that the number of IoT devices will rise to 26 billion by 2020. Products like LED bulbs, sports equipment, home appliances, toys, and power sockets will be integrated with your smartphone through applications. In this way, the smartphone can be used as a remote control, coordinate with social networks, and monitor tweets or posts. Companies like Microsoft have also begun to join the field of IoT development; software technologies like RiotOS and ThingsquareMist, and communication technologies like RFID, WiFi, and EnOcean have also begun to join. Google, of course, is not far behind and has begun to launch projects such as Nest and Brillo to prepare for the Internet of Things. These applications will help you easily control various appliances in your home.

Trend 3: Mobile e-commerce
In the past, people used debit and credit cards to pay, but since the birth of Apple Pay and Google Wallet, our payment behavior has become more convenient. Of course, in the future, payments can also be completed through more wearable devices, which is not far away.

Trend 4: Position and motion sensing
Providing positioning data is now the mainstream of mobile application function development. This is a revolutionary innovation because it improves our personal safety factor with high-tech means, and realizes anti-theft, power management and other functions. The positioning system can also provide many value-added services, such as geo-tagging and vehicle navigation, which are quickly accepted and used by people. Personalized services such as precise indoor positioning have also been implemented in some applications.

Trend 5: Enhanced mobile user experience
When it comes to good user experience, effectively displaying content is crucial. Big companies like Instagram, Pinterest, Houzz, and Wonderlist develop innovative patterns that display the most intuitive design and user interaction interface. With the emergence of new features such as loop design patterns, cards, and content processing, the interactive content used by applications has also become another agenda in the mobile application development industry. Leading applications usually have excellent humanized design, which also puts higher requirements on improving user experience.

Trend 6: Application Performance Management (APM)
APM stands for Application Performance Management, which consists of mobile metrics and monitoring tools dedicated to improving testing and quality. APM provides statistics and insights into application behavior to assess which applications are operating successfully. The benefit of APM is that it can cross the virtual boundaries of the system. Future testing requires more powerful tool support to monitor the resources used by applications; link data with relevant users; coordinate business processes and performance, etc.

Trend 7: Enterprise Mobility Management
Enterprise Mobile Management, or EMMS (E-Commerce Information Management Structure) is a part of mobile computing business. EMMS is the crystallization of a group of people's wisdom and technology. Financial management and security are the key to EMM, while mobile device management and enterprise file synchronization are also components of mobile management. With the upgrade of mobile operating systems, the demand for mobile management is also increasing, which has promoted the development and growth of EMM. In the digital ecosystem, mobile application development has become the most important aspect because they design and develop the latest and most practical user applications. Therefore, mobile application developers should follow these trends to adapt to the innovation of mobile application development strategies.

By Michael Waugh
Original link: https://dzone.com/articles/7-upcoming-trends-in-mobile-app-development-indust
Translated by Liu Nina

[Translated by 51CTO. Please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]