The Future of Mobile App Development
While the sales of smart phones and tablets have already surpassed the sales of laptops and PCs it definitely looks good for the app market. So what can we see in the future?
According to IDC report published on June 28, 2011, app downloads are projected to grow from 10.7 billion (2010) to more than 182 billion in 2015. Reports also show that mobile advertising spending is increasing 20-30% annually in the developed markets. We are finally at the stage where mobile is seriously considered as one of the channels for marketing.
One of the things we can expect to drive the app market is smart personalization of services and devices. Many of the popular apps already rely heavily on user’s location data available via GPS or a quick sign-up process with Facebook ID. Time and usability are critical when turning one time user to a paying customer. Further utilization of the device capabilities will also play a major role in the native app market. Application developers are pushing the industry towards to a more sustainable app industry with focus on social media connectivity, advertising and commerce within the app.
This takes us to the OS complexity hell. Should you develop the app as native to multiple platforms or make a web app that runs on all? It certainly gives the app huge advantage to be able to use the device capabilities like camera, but it will explode the development budget to cover all operating systems. This is nothing new in the mobile industry and believe me, it used to be much more complex… But it all boils down to what is the app and who are its users. Many believe that future will be dominated by web apps but for special apps and corporate solutions, where employees might have only iPhones for example, a native app is the way.
While the devices and apps are getting smarter it looks like some of the App Stores are getting ‘tighter’ and towards closed, controlled environment. You can read too often about Apple kicking out apps from the store and at the same time they release a new iPhone including the same functionality. Also, the 30% revenue cut by Apple is not supported by all businesses. Maybe the question should be what is the future of the app stores? From the sales point its quite similar to e.g. music sales where the top 10 records are successful while the others are lost in the binary world. Some App Stores are already changing how the apps are ranked and taking also data such as customer reviews into account instead of just number of downloads.
The app industry is young and developing very fast, but its definitely worth looking into. Thats where the users are and its shiny and new. There are plenty of successful business cases from various industry from small cafeteria business to a global hospital solutions, where the apps have improved the business profitability in a very short time. So, its not just games that are making the headlines.
