The Next Big Thing in App Development

Elena Diadikova

April 05, 2017

	Not rated
	Rate:

We are rushing and embracing new trends with a skyrocketing speed. What’s next is the continuous question everyone keeps asking. What is the future of mobile apps? What are the next mobile app trends? And now?

Here is the list of the major trends that are shaping the year of 2017 for you prepared by the experts of The App Solutions, an app development company.

What’s next - Application Development Trends

1.Progressive web apps

Progressive web app from Google is nothing else than a new methodology of building mobile software. This is a hybrid of a regular website application development and a native mobile application. It aims to combine the best features of both platforms and simplify user experience even more. You don’t need to download it from the App Store, it works in all browsers and has a mobile app interface, at the same time placed in the browser. It doesn’t mean that native apps are all bad now. This is just a more optimized approach to using capacities of both platforms for the sake of users’ comfort.

2. Chatbots

Ok, let’s face it - sooner or later artificial intelligence is going to replace lots of customer support jobs and businesses. Small and medium scale businesses will surely take this relay race first and test chatbots out. And this way they’ll be able to leg up on the competition even without spending dozens of hundreds of dollars on maintaining a huge support team.

So what is a chatbot? Basically, it’s a robot that runs automated tasks in real time. Obviously, there are particular algorithms with the pre-inserted responses within the chat application. For now, it’s not that flawless, but great for the restaurants and other service-based businesses.

So how it’s working you ask. Right when the visitor hits the button of the query on the site or in the mobile app, the meaning of the message is analyzed by an appropriate algorithm and the suitable answer pops up.

3. Assistant-As-Apps

First, it’s important to clarify what Assistant-As-App actually is. Siri, Cortana, Facebook M, Google Now - all these famous services are basically your personal, proactive mobile assistants. They are often called “Invisible Apps” too.

What these apps do is basically sorting your life, making it organized, structured, categorized - call it however you want. They simplify and accelerate every operation you do to fix your chores, to book or buy something, simply to search the info.

Siri - a true pioneer in the technology, this personalized assistant can fix your queries in a human manner, can talk to you and search for the proper info.

Cortana - the mobile assistant which actually quite a multi-tasker. It has a wider functionality than Siri and Google Now. It will search the web, message someone for your phonebook and organize your life through a notebook filled with your favorite spots, chores to solve, etc.

Facebook M - as a part of Facebook Messanger, it will shop for you, book a table at the restaurant and all that good stuff.

Google Now - the latest version includes song recognition, saving your onboarding passes, barcode scanning, touchless access with “OK Google”.

4. Predictive apps

Such sort of apps uses predictive analytics and big data to provide the appropriate functionality to the user. And even more, they are supposed to bring the right, individualized content at the right time by continuously learning about the user from all his activities:

- who the individual really is;

- what’s his/her intent at the moment;

- putting together content and features to match this intent;

- and finally, optimizing for the particular device.

Surely, it requires new components for the hardware to match all these activities.

5. VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality)

Both of the technologies have conquered the world lately. So what’s the difference between them?

Actually, it’s only a small one. Augmented Reality is the technology, which blends the real-life picture with the elements of virtual reality. Whereas Virtual Reality is a completely artificial world created for the user to interact with like in the real life.

After the introduction of the device based on VR by Google (Cardboard) in 2014, it became highly popular and the biggest tech players (Facebook - Oculus, Microsoft - HoloLens) released their versions of it. Moreover, it has motivated creators of content to develop apps and games with these technologies embedded.

Finally, this is quite a different experience for users and VR/AR gets a lot of interest and demand from the market.

To sum up

This wraps up our record of the deciding app development trends of 2017. Go ahead and certainly implement some of these features to your own mobile app, because users love trendy stuff indeed! Not to mention, it will usually enhance productivity and wow-effect of your business. So that’s an undoubtedly Win-Win situation.

That sounds totally like mobile app development future, doesn’t it?