From work to bed, mobile phones have become an integral part of our digital lives. Smartphone companies are competing themselves to improve the mobile experience through various innovative changes in their hardware components. They started standardizing USB – C everywhere, left behind headphone jacks, mainstreamed bezel free smartphones and more. Now integrating this futuristic hardware experience with the mobile software’s is becoming a key challenge for application development companies. We generally believe mobile phone typically serve the purpose of calling, Whatsapping, checking mails and fulfilling our media experience. But there is a lot of productivity that we squeeze out of mobile applications pressing the business needs in various industries. Let’s buzz around the top 5 trends in mobile technology.
Capitalizing mobile applications for small business
There is always a misconception that mobile applications are always for customers, but there are applications that ease the business of SME’s managing their reports and financial needs for enterprises. Expensify, Quickbooks are such mobile apps that act as a virtual accountant organizing the sales reports, keep track of expenses and sync those to our PC and laptops.
Location based services (LBS)
The evolution of Geofencing and push notifications has structured the journey of mobile technology growth. Mobile users started relying on the real-time and location based solutions for various purposes from shopping, weather conditions, finding nearest fuel stations, calculating shortest distance and more through “Near me” searches.
Apps on the Go
Android’s instant apps reduce the wait of the user to download and install the app for using it. They have the same animations and material design extracted from the native application. It is the next step in the app streaming feature which is more efficient in the latest version of Android Oreo. This will reduce the app size and will soon get integration along with the launcher.
Utility of AR & VR
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are two terms that are set to create real world experiences while using mobile phones. Apart from AR shopping experience which was adopted earlier by Amazon and few other E-commerce giants, integrating AR with the utility and productivity apps is now trending which uses the phones hardware sensors and camera to provide real time useful information. Few examples being, “iOnRoad Augmented Driving” & “Google Translate” which are really fun to play with.
Mobile Assistants
You are already late if you aren’t using your mobile phone’s virtual personal assistants. Google Assistant, Siri, Alex, Cortana and the new baby Bixby are battling to enhance the everyday user experience. The development in these AI based assistants is really ground breaking which will greatly alter the next generation mobile phone users. Nobody really won this battle yet, as they are still in developmental stages and growing to perform much advanced voice based computing.
According to Gartner, “268 Billion downloads will generate $77 Billion worth of revenue in 2017”. It has to be noted that mobile apps are driving the business for many enterprises, irrespective the purpose the application serves. They simply act as marketing tool to showcase your business. The importance given to cloud based mobile apps for smartphones are not moving to trend on developing apps for wearable’s, IoT devices and Self-driving cars. It is high time for us to understand the importance of this small wave of revolution in mobile apps, which has a high change of storming big in the future.
