Upcoming Trends in Mobile App Development

The main computing focus is gradually shifting away from traditional desktop PCs to mobile devices, and the two major reasons for this are as follows:

• Mobile apps market is growing. This growth is made especially conspicuous against the background of the slowed down sales of desktops and PCs. Indeed, decent made-in-China Smartphone can be bought for a very cheap price, so that even people in third-world countries can afford them.

• A mobile device is both a phone and a smart phone. Most of the time it remains close to the user, which means that it comes in handy in cases where using ‘big machines’ is impossible or inconvenient.

“The more popular smartphones are becoming, the more services are provided and consumed online”

By and large, we can speak of four main trends in the mobile app world:

Games

We’ve had them on our phones for a long time now and their nature hasn’t changed much. As a rule, mobile games don’t offer a complex gameplay experience. Or, even if they do, such are few. Instead, they help users to while away their free time.

How are smartphone apps different from desktop apps? The essential difference has to do with how users interact with the app on a mobile touchscreen device compared to a keyboard and mouse-driven desktop or laptop. Unlike using a PC, when the user can settle at a desk and spend some quality time working/reading/ playing uninterrupted, many people tend to use smartphones ‘on the go’, i.e. the interaction consists of a series of quick actions. This ‘taking-out-looking-pressing-finding-hiding’ happens while the user is walking, standing in a queue and in other similar situations, where there is little time for actually using the app.

There are approaches where programmers create a specific game framework – which is almost identical for all games that belong to the same franchise – and then simply change scenery. A good example is a popular room escape franchise, where one game is different from another only by a combination of brain teasers and quizzes.

Social apps

The idea of social applications flows organically from the very concept of a smartphone as a means of communication. Yet social apps are not limited to making calls and sending texts. Man is a social being with independence, creativity and consciousness, meaning that even such ‘non-social’ applications as browsers end up with social functions like ‘share a link’. Communication capabilities are boundless. Almost any social interaction act can be transferred to a smartphone, i.e. right to the user’s pocket.

Sensor-based apps

These apps can offer users something that desktops essentially do not have: data from built-in GPS receivers, gyroscopes, accelerometers, etc. This group can be roughly divided into two categories: navigation and map applications and fitness applications.

Business-specific apps

From accounting and babysitting to x-raying and zorbing – “there’s an app for that”. Businesses have high hopes for this new medium. CIOs are looking to mobile to reduce costs and increase employee productivity, create new revenue opportunities, showcase products and services, or reach new customers. Although app development costs and timelines may vary depending on the nature of the app, its functions, infrastructure, and backend, there are ample positive reasons to embrace the ‘mobile revolution’.

According to comScore, at the start of 2015, nearly 75 percent of mobile subscribers in the U.S. owned smartphones. By December 2015, this figure will be above 80 per cent. For comparison, in December 2013, it was 65.2 percent.

The more popular smartphones are becoming, the more services are provided and consumed online. This tremendous shift from offline to online and, consequently, mobile is especially obvious in the banking industry. Mobile banking is taking over traditional banking because it brings a range of benefits both to banks and to their customers. For one thing, customer satisfaction and loyalty in the online environment is different from that in the offline environment. For another – digital banking is saving financial institutions money (e.g. average mobile transactions cost 10 times less than ATM transactions). A recent survey by TSYS reports that 50 percent of respondents have installed a mobile app from their bank, of those respondents, 70 percent use the app a few times a month or more. Similar results were found in a research conducted by the Bank of America.

Another example of mobile’s impact on business is a growing number of retail mobile transactions. It is estimated that in 2015 U.S. mobile commerce sales will total $104.05 billion, up 38.7 percent from $75.03 billion in 2014.

Conclusion

The global mobile industry being what it is, we have a curious situation with mobile app development and market competition. Mobile platforms provide rich interaction with users. New interaction options are being added day by day. Three or four years ago we couldn’t even think of trying to extract smartphone functionality out of smartphones to use it on some other devices. Today we have smart watches and smart glasses, and it becomes clear that developers should consider wearable tech as the next computing platform for new user services based on new interaction patterns.

However, owing to certain characteristics of wearable gadgets, the complexity of mobile apps cannot grow infinitely. These characteristics include a relatively low performance (an average smartphone is far behind the desktop), battery life restricting processor potential, a small screen and even user behaviour and interaction patterns. That is, there is a ceiling on reasonable functional complexity of mass mobile applications.

Interest in mobile apps, as well as the number of business opportunities, is on the rise, yet the number of industry players is growing more slowly. New players often just copy the existing solutions. The very nature of mobile applications makes it possible to enter the market at relatively low costs – it takes a couple of months and a couple of medium-skilled developers to create an average app. In other words, the number of vacant market niches is still huge, and the cost of attempting to fill in those niches is not too high.

Next:

An Overview of Trends to Coalesce Mobile Application Development Strategies

Isu Sahai is currently working at Manduka as the VP of Information Technology, overseeing all technology initiatives across business applications, analytics, e-commerce platform, digital initiatives, networking, cybersecurity, hardware management and IT helpdesk. He has been in this space for 2 decades, centered primarily on business applications & analytics, getting into the space of cybersecurity, ecommerce and observing how that interplay of technology footprint works in tandem with business value.

Mobile Application – An overview

There are two different types of mobile applications, one on your phone devices and the other used in handheld devices for the warehouse or product development and manufacturing.

We have had our internal warehouse operations targeted at users of the mobile apps for warehouse activities. This technology has been around for a while, but it needs to be able to support the business process as well, while providing real-time analytics associated with it. Typically, in warehouse operations, we had basic OOB reporting from the ERP, but getting analytical insights was difficult and resources consuming. Our focus therefore has been towards supporting the business process and providing selective insights on using mobile apps to better manage our resources, cost, productivity, and balancing warehouse demands. We also, re-sequence floor tasks or locator layout, aligning them to floor operations within the warehouse and provide a more time effective environment.

Emerging trends in Mobile apps

Many companies today are exploring this niche space to provide business support backed by a team of competent IT personnel along with a superior analytical platform. We have been evaluating a few products in that direction, and the interesting part has been that it’s more like a Warehouse as a Service (WaaS) kind of a model. They provide you their device with their proprietary software. Through this, they capture not just the transactions by integrating to the ERP; they also capture the exact time it takes for people as they walk around the facilities. And based on that, they have their data science algorithms, which optimize and give us prescriptive recommendations. For instance, if you change the layout of your warehouse, then certain activities can be done a lot faster, or certain people are doing things more quickly than other people. Hence, you try to figure out your “smart people” who are more intelligent in doing certain activities and how the team can collectively learn from them. Also, what they do differently as compared to people who are a lot slower in their productivity and come up with comprehensive plans around improving the collective team performance. So we do see a lot of potential in that regards as we have been evaluating these tools

.  ​Stay abreast with technology but in parallel finely balance cutting edge technology adoption with security  

A strategy that is Steering your Business Growth

Our focus has been multi-pronged. There is an adoption of secure, compliant cloud centric IT model which we require to support with hybrid resource model. So our focus is on building lean IT such that we can get maximum output from the limited resources. We certainly do not intend to groom in house expertise in every technology domain, instead leverage partners who are experts in their respective spaces. And with that in mind, we have made a conscious effort of defining a technology ecosystem in which we are partnering with these vendors who have specific capabilities and which can plug seamlessly into our core team. It also provides us the value and insights that we are looking for in the space of business apps, e-commerce, warehousing apps or insights. Lastly, we focus primarily on establishing a strong and robust transactional system with clearly identified data sources. This year and going forward our focus is on graduating into a prescriptive and predictive analytics based organization – where analytics drives decision making. To this extent, we have tools that can provide insights for active decision making for the executives of other operational teams, and ones we are trying to support as we move into technology 2.0.

What’s Next?

Till now the connectivity of technology has been centered around Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. But as we get into the adoption of 5G, with edge computing coming into play, there is going to be a major transformation in the mobile space, effecting our lives. There would be touch points where users would have access to real-time insights. Devices would readily perform analytics and prescribe what you should be doing rather than having to wait on a reactive analytical platform. We see the technology going forward in a direction, that is driving change in how we work and live, empowered by data insights. I also believe that another digital initiatives which would play an impactful role is wearable technologies. Identifying those respective use cases for wearable technology, embedding them in our product portfolio, driving new product and service monetization options, would be an interesting use case in the consumer space. Deriving value both from an organization standpoint as well as for consumer base in general is something which would drive a lot of data science operations going forward. So there is a lot of potential not just with our internal business operations but also with respect to the experience and value for the customers who are buying our products.

Piece of Advice

We cannot insulate ourselves from the technology transformation around us. Embracing technology is not a matter of IF but WHEN, and in this journey with so many drivers there is a fear in the IT executives of lagging behind. But in the quest of digital revamp one has to ensure that there is a good balance between what is secure and what is cutting edge. That’s where the role of technology executives come in; to make the right call and go with the crawl, walk, run approach. They must be able aware of technology options, pick the ones needed for Proof of concept (POC), fail fast, and above all ensure it fits the enterprise roadmap. So start defining your next technology experience. Stay abreast with technology but in parallel finely balance cutting edge technology adoption with security.

Next:

Growing Mobile Trends and Increased Security Concerns

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” Winston Churchill’s inspirational quote draws the perfect metaphor to explain the role of security and mobile devices in work place today. Mobile devices though immensely beneficial, present numerous security challenges. Though mobile technology is growing rapidly than any other in the past few years, and the IT industry has designed an impressive number of services targeting mobile platforms, mobile devices and its evolution is beset with pros and cons. Mobile App trends are building a world of endless possibilities not only for the organizations but also for hackers and cyber criminals.

The development of technology, demand for use of mobile devices in organizations is not only facilitating better business, but also opening doors for innovative attack vectors.  Financially motivated attackers will always be on the lookout to discover vulnerabilities and launch attacks.

The most common problem that every CIO encounters with mobile devices in organizations is security breaches. Although every organization takes proper care and makes sure that confidential information is properly distributed with limited access, this is not enough to ensure better security.  

Threats are being developed every day, causing huge financial as well as data loss. Gartner says that through 2016, the financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10 percent per year, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities. Improved combinations of evolving threats and vulnerabilities will result in continued cyber attacks unless organizations take security as the top priority. That cement the reason for CIO’s to be careful and employ best in class security measures while using mobile devices and applications within organizations.                            

Recent studies also denote an increased growth of viruses and malwares targeting mobile devices.  Hackers are reported to be developing various methods of breaching into mobile devices. Accounting for about 72 percent of infections and being the fourth most-prevalent malware overall, Hummingbad- dominates mobile malware space today. Also, during the beginning of 2016, Botnets- a new malware distribution technique emerged in the mobile world. Botnets are group of devices that are controlled by hackers without the owner’s knowledge. The capabilities of Botnets depend on the number of devices that are under control of the hacker.

Researchers even detected botnets and malwares that managed to infiltrate into prominent websites providing third-party applications and support tools. Mobile botnets are widely used today to generate fraudulent traffic and malicious ad clicks. But these are not the limits of botnets. They can be leveraged to accomplish disrupting goals, like DDoS attacks with a devastating effect on organizations resulting in huge data and financial loss.

Better Security with Mobile Devices

To be safe from cyber threats is not an easy task nowadays because of the highly sophisticated malware technologies being developed every day. Here are few strategies that can be adopted for a safer use of mobile applications.

1. Third-party security applications

Today, there are several third-party security applications available that can save mobile devices from cyber attacks through networks as well as external applications.  Prominent organizations like Avast, Norton, and McAfee antivirus are some of the top rated mobile antivirus providers.             

2. Best Practices

Adopt the best practices that include well maintained security, proper configuration, limited data as well as network access, regular updates and installation of applications from trusted sources. Encrypting confidential data in mobile devices and practicing safe browsing techniques are also important. Always be cautious about app permissions and watch out for any unnecessary misuse of permission levels by applications.

3. Mobile device Management Solutions

An efficient mobile device management solution can be used to monitor and manage mobile devices inside the organization. These applications allow centralized control and management of mobile devices of registered employees.