Future of Mobile Apps: App Development Trends Prediction for 2020

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a huge increase in the number of mobile apps, which is in part due to more people owning smartphones. Industry giants such as Amazon, Bank of America, Walmart and many others have taken advantage of all the benefits mobile apps offer particular user engagement and brand awareness. Since many experts are predicting even more growth in the future for mobile apps, let’s take a look at some mobile app trends 2020 and beyond.    

1. Rise of IoT and Wearables 

According to Gartner, the number of connected devices is expected to be more than 26 billion in 2020 and include things like household appliances, toys, LEDs and much more. Wearables are also likely to see massive growth and be a $661 billion-dollar industry by 2021. The connection between IoT and wearable devices is that users will rely more on wearables to communicate with their IoT connected devices than smartphones. Since the devices need to be able to communicate with each other, expect cloud technology to grow as well since it works well with connecting different devices. Pay particularly close attention to the development of APIs and containers since one of the future mobile development trends is to use the low code.    

2. AR Will Be a Game Changer 

Augmented reality burst onto the scene in 2016 with games such as Pokémon Go and continued to grow in popularity ever since. Augmented reality and virtual reality development are expected to play an essential role in the future of mobile app development not just in gaming, but also in industries such as retail, real estate, healthcare, and many others. With such a wide variety of uses, expect AR and VR to start appearing in traditional mobile apps through 2020 and beyond as more and more business realize the vast potential of these technologies.   

3. Mobile Commerce Will Continue to get Stronger  

Mobile payment systems such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet are top-rated and will drive mobile purchasing through 2020. If we include wearable technology into the mix, we may see a point where people will prefer to make payments with their phones and smartwatches instead of credit cards.  

4. Cloud Driven Apps Will Continue to Grow   

According to research by Cisco, 90% of all mobile data traffic will gravitate towards cloud driven apps. The result will be overall growth of 60%. With such a rapid growth rate, do not be surprised to see powerful mobile apps that can retrieve data from the cloud yet take up less space on the users’ phones.    

5. Micro and Enterprise Apps Will Be Widely Accepted 

The goal of mobile apps enterprise is to assist businesses in managing their workflows. A great example of this is Evernote which is useful for organizing and planning work processes. There are many other apps for your CRM, supply chain that try to make your work processes easier to manage. Conversely, there are micro apps that are focused on helping you do one thing only such as Facebook’s Messenger app. Both enterprise and micro apps are expected to see growth in the coming years.  

6. Location-Based Services Will be Used Even More

The most widely used location-based services today are iBeacon from Apple and Google’s Beacon. Since these devices have already proven to be of value to the users, expect more external devices to be integrated with mobile apps for business development purposes. The reason for this is that it gives marketers and business owners a ton of information on customer behavior that they can use to make all kinds of adjustments to increase sales.    

7. Instant Apps

Users love mobile apps, but they do not like to wait for them to be downloaded. Such a demand gave rise to instant apps. While the idea of instant apps was born way back in 2016, expect them to become very popular over the coming years especially since clients are always demanding better user experiences and faster load times.  

8. More Attention Given to Security

With some of the biggest names in their respective industry such as Uber, Facebook and Google experiencing hacking attacks and leaked user data, expect the apps of the future to make an added emphasis on security and focus more attention on penetration testing.  

9. Predictive Analytics Will Affect UI/UX  

Future applications will no longer be simply a utility but will be instrumental in your everyday workflow.  Companies such as Apple and Facebook are already using artificial intelligence along with predictive analytics to offer a better customer journey as far as the UI/UX of their apps are concerned, and you can expect it to become even more user-friendly and customized as well.  

10. On-demand Apps  

An on-demand app is a middleman between the user and a service provider. Basically, instead of having to use up time and effort to get what they want, clients are willing to pay a small fee for the convenience. For example, let’s say you have a busy day at the office, and you do not have time to go eat a healthy lunch. You can use an on-demand app to bring any food you would like to your location. Expect more apps of this nature to start popping up in the coming years.    

While we have looked at the mobile app industry trends that we expect to appear in 2020 and beyond, a lot will also depend on the advancements made in smartphones as well. Since new technology could be implemented inside smartphones, you can expect new appear to try to take advantage of these new features.