2016 Mobile App Trends

Mobility has transformed the foundation of communication and smartphones and mobile devices are proliferating the market. Cashing in on this new wave of business opportunity, app developers are in a frenzy to outdo each other and design apps which will be the next big `find 'of the technology world. Enterprises across industry segments such as insurance, finance, healthcare, automotive and energy are adopting mobility as a key strategy. Their adoption of mobility into their overall strategy requires integrated platforms that leverage all their applications to offer users a unified experience. These platforms will modernize the enterprise and ensure that the means and methods of collaboration and communication are changed irrevocably. To summarize, life post-mobility is different from what it was before.

For mobile developers, some trends are already dictating the momentum, making a difference to app development. Some of these trends are:

Hybrid HTML 5

App developers mostly prefer native applications, however, hybrid HTML5 application is gaining speed both with enterprises and consumer apps. Fima Katz, CEO, and founder of Appery, makers of the Appery.io mobile application development platform says, "Hybrid HTML5 will become the most obvious choice for most enterprise use cases in 2016."

Hybrid HTML5's supported features include Geolocation API, offline web application support, Web Storage, CSS3 Selectors and 2D animations.

Cross-Platform Mobile App Development

Tablets are slowly losing momentum, but continue to remain popular in the enterprise, and used substantially by emergency workers, service technicians, and engineers. If tablets continue to retain their popularity, the demand for cross-platform mobile solutions is likely to see a significant growth. To summarize, workers will be juggling between their laptops / desktops, tablets and mobile devices all within the same day. This essentially means that futuristic apps have to be device agnostic. An application will need to demonstrate identical power, look and feel, to help the user perform his task, irrespective of the screen size or the amount of data that is being stored or retrieved.

Mobile CRM and Wearable Tech

Gartner recently released research that predicts that 40 percent of sales organizations will rely primarily on mobile digital technology for their sales automation initiatives by 2020. This essentially means a marriage of mobile with CRM software to ensure anywhere / anytime information accessibility, interactivity, and real- time intelligence. Mobile Customer Relationship Management (Mobile CRM) is a tool that is designed specifically for mobile devices. Sales teams across geographies can log into the CRM through Mobile CRM and access customer information.

Data Visualization

Data visualization which is the presentation of information in a pictorial or graphical format is trending with enterprises. Through the ages, enterprises depend on intelligence and analytics to predict business performance and strategy and data visualization helps to present data in an easy to see and absorb manner. Mobile proliferation is necessitating data visualization to be format agnostic. This essentially means that data should now be necessarily presented in a small screen as much as in a large screen.

Mobile App Personalization

Global offices and seamless communication are paving the way for a new brand of information workers. This brand is not bound by desktops and prefers to work for any place, at any time. For them, mobile devices are `God sent '. They want to be able to work remotely, access their enterprise applications on the device and be able to perform all their tasks from their mobile devices. This trend is leading to the next trend that is mobile app personalization. Apps, going forward, will have to be more personalized addressing individual users to encourage usage and adoption.

Keeping all the above facts in mind, we can confidently say that mobile apps are trending with each new day creating new opportunities for app developers. The need is intense but also extremely complex as mobile app developers will have to think of ways to address the needs of the customer. It is no more about technology as a stand-alone function, but more as a fully integrated, device agnostic, user-friendly, solution to address a specific need. Thus app developers, instead of focussing on creating an app they think is smart should focus on thinking of the app as a solution to address a specific need of their user base. Once they identify this user base the other steps will naturally fall in place.