Emerging Niches and Technologies in Mobile App Development

If there have been wide array of successful consumer apps like Angry Bird or WhatsApp or DropBox. After years of reign in the publicity focus finally these consumer apps giants understood the importance of offering enterprise grade features. In last few years suddenly the focus shifted to enterprise mobile apps.

Rapid development, tracking or monitoring apps, wearable apps, Internet of Things Apps, Geo-location technologies like iBeacon and Geofencing in business apps, the list of emerging app niches and technologies seem to be too long. Let us have a quick look at some of the most definitive app niches and technologies in recent times. 

Enterprise apps

While smartphones and mobile devices continue to move off the shelves and millions of apps continue to make the app stores brimming with energy, activity and competition, most consumer app still fail to make a earning to survive beyond the year of their launch. This has been the sordid storyline for consumer apps for years. So, for some time the focus of developers is shifting towards enterprise apps. Moreover, now businesses are bent on going mobile and they are keen to develop apps that make their business process more productive. Although enterprise mobile apps have just started to take off this new and broad app niche already shown huge promise to take over consumer apps in just more than a year down the line.

Rapid development

As enterprises now focusing all out to embrace mobile apps in their business process, the new demand of enterprise grade apps made rapid development cycle obvious. When winning competition for businesses is boiling down to a fast and user focused mobile presence, fast paced development will naturally be the rule. This overwhelming demand of business apps and enterprise grade software made rapid development a criterion in the present scenario. Shortening the development lifecycle has now become the major focus for most mobile app development companies around the world.

Mobile monitoring apps

Wide adaptation of mobile devices and apps among all age groups and people in recent years gave rise to certain concerns. Child security concern, parental concern for negative influence on children, employer’s concern on employee productivity and information security, etc. are some of the major concerns centered on the mobile devices. IOS or Android monitoring software, child phone tracker apps, mobile spy software, text message tracking apps, are few of the app types getting increasingly popular these days to address the aforementioned concerns in family or workplace environments. 

Internet of Things (IOT) apps

The world around us is becoming connected with the mobile devices and gadgets and devices around us are increasingly finding themselves equipped with mobile control interface. This new horizon of interconnected devices is referred as Internet of Things or IOT. Now an electric toaster can be controlled from its respective app on the mobile device. Similarly, the music system with the respective mobile app can be turned on and off, tuned in and given other commands. This new breed of apps is being called IOT apps.

Wearable apps

The smartphones or smart mobile devices are now playing the central role in connecting all types of wearable smart devices. Most smartwatch apps are still now in character only the extension of their mobile counterparts. But as smartwatch is slowly picking up to be the next big device platform as commonest wearable, a new breed of apps are being developed targeting smartwatch and wearable users besides offering their respective mobile apps as well. From smart jewelries to health trackers and fitness bands to optically mounted computers like Google Glass, these new wearable devices will be the target development platform for a vast majority of mobile app developers in the time to come.

More user-optimized mobile UI design

UI design is presently the most focus driven area for mobile app development around the world. Experiments and analysis on making UIs better and user optimized is continuing and a wide variety of new techniques and design approaches are giving birth to unprecedented level of excellence in user experience. From motivational design to flat design to and playful interfaces, we have come across quite a few dominating design trends and techniques.

Geo-location technologies

Contextual and user specific push notification is the new maneuver to engage users with a mobile app and to garner revenue from the process. This cannot be better done than by knowing the user location. When you know the location of a user close to your retail shop you can notify him with an offer to grab his attention and push him for a visit to your store. Thus knowing the user location translates to far better contextual and business driven messaging and notifications. Several mobile friendly Geo-location technologies like iBeacon, Geofencing, Geomagnetics, etc. are there to let you integrate location based user engagement features in your app.