Leading Mobile App Development Trends for 2015

As 2015 digs in, the year’s trends for mobile application developers are clarifying. Here are four of particular interest to mobile device application developers.

1. Apple's Swift Programming Language

apple-swift Leading Mobile App Development Trends for 2015Apple wowed the crowd with its release of Swift, the new iOS development language. Especially popular with developers are its Ruby-like functional programming features, such as inferred data typing, and its on-the-fly, no-compile sandboxes they call Playgrounds. None of the programming features is truly new, but having them in a single language is.

How well was Apple’s Swift language lapped up by mobile developers? Let the numbers speak for themselves:

• Just four months after launch, it is used by over 20% of developers
• Almost 25% of Swift programmers are new to iOS app development

For such a short time period, those figures are astounding. Objective-C still has 39% adoption after nearly a decade of use for iOS development. Objective-C is not obsolete by any means and developers need to know both languages for the foreseeable future.

2.  Cross-platform Development  

If you want your app on all major mobile platforms, you need a cross-development strategy. Thirty percent of developers use cross-platform toolkits, and that number is on the rise. No single “cross-dev” platform dominates yet however.
 

This year, something else is driving cross-development frameworks’ rise. The money is not in consumer apps, but in enterprise apps. Far more enterprise mobile app developers make the big bucks than do consumer app developers.
 

Enterprises want B2C apps to work everywhere and support Bring-Your-Own-Device for employees and B2B partners. That means they need to cover all the bases device-wise.
 

Here are four of the most popular, stable cross-development frameworks:

• Xamarin integrates with Visual Studio and runs apps with native UI and native performance with broad and deep libraries for the 3 major platforms. They recently announced partnerships with IBM, Xoriant and Microsoft.
• PhoneGap is based on open-source Cordova, which makes it free. It is a browser app container-based platform on which developers build with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Sencha’s enterprise product is Ext JS 5. Developers write in HTML5 and use PhoneGap to transpose to other platforms.
• Appcelerator Titanium is an open-source SDK for cross-development across iOS, Android and Blackberry. It comes with over 5000 APIs, an IDE and the Alloy MVC framework.

3. Wearable Devices and the Internet of Things 

Mobile developers cannot wait for IoT to get off the ground. Already, half of them are working on IoT-related projects; many working on their own dime. The top sectors receiving attention are smart home and wearable device apps.

The new Apple Watch is particularly enticing for cross-device apps that run on an iOS phone, the watch and perhaps 3rd-party devices or other “things.” The Android/iOS Pebble is sure to catch developers’ imagination in the same manner.

Device combinations mean an almost unlimited scope for new apps, well beyond the current focus on health-related applications. 

4.   Mobile Commerce

The introduction of Apple Pay last year was a milestone along the way for the flurry of new e-wallets that followed from Samsung, Google, Visa, Mastercard and MasterPass. Along with these, came myriad different authentication methods including fingerprints and face and voice recognition.

In-app purchases are flattening out, however, so growth must come from tapping into other payment venues. Starbucks is rolling out its own in-store mobile-commerce-slash-loyalty platform, for instance.

There is no dearth of ideas within the e-pay revolution. More devices, including wearable devices, can take advantage of NFC or Bluetooth to embed your credit card digitally and pass it on at POS terminals. The same technology can herald your entrance to a store’s “customer-area-network” to deliver you coupons, specials and store layout.
 

The uber-trend in all this is that mobile technology is growing faster than the dandelions in your back yard. Thus, mobile app developers as a whole are already behind the curve and, more likely than not, loving it.
 

The Apple Watch, smart homes, wearable devices, increased connectivity and the rain of IoT devices about to fall out of the sky are all opportunities for new apps and new development tools upon which to create those apps.