Mobile Technology – Seven trends to watch out

September 1, 2018

With their growing ubiquity and versatility, the Smartphones have made a place in our life which makes them essential to our very being, to say the least. The usage statistics alone have revealed our dependencies on these small yet very significant devices. A typical day for us these days, begins with an alarm snooze in the smartphone, continues while catching up on the news updates, checking our work emails, paying the bills, watching videos in the spare time and ends with exchanging messages with our close ones on multiple social media platforms. For all these reasons, we stay connected to our smartphones in some way every few minutes in our waking hours – on an average around 265 times in a day, as the studies reveal!!

This level of usage is what inspires the mobile experts to innovate and come up with new mobile trends every now and then. Each new app brings a new way of engaging and interacting with the device to cater to the ever-growing demands of the users. Here are some of the upcoming mobile technology trends that we have been witnessing of late:

1) Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality at work

With Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality at work for the mobile phones, a user dives into an artificial 3-D world instead of just staring at a mobile screen. This trend has particularly contributed to turn the world of entertainment and gaming upside down. So, we can conveniently expect more exciting times ahead in terms of innovation in these areas with the use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

2) Use of Artificial intelligence (AI)

With the use of Artificial Intelligence, the businesses have benefited by accessing a lot of meaningful insight leveraging the cognitive interfaces, advanced analytics and the machine learning technology. This has helped the mobile applications to enhance the user experience in a huge big way by imparting highly personalised and relevant information to the users.

3) Using the Internet of Things (IoT)

The internet of things employs a network of physical objects embedded with software sensors, electronics and the connectivity to a network. Together these elements allow the physical object to collect and transfer the relevant data without having to include any human interaction. The Smart Homes and the Smart Switches are the manifestations of this technology and the mobile applications supporting this technology are going to be in demand in near future.

4) Location-specific services and the use of Beacons

Various businesses such as the hotels and restaurants, retail outlets, museums and healthcare centres are now able to provide their mobile app users with highly location-specific information with the use of Beacons. Adding to the convenience of a mobile user on-the-go, this trend is sure to witness a rise in the days to come.

5) Wearable Apps

The wearable technology is already catching on and the applications supporting the wearable devices are only going to witness an increase in the market demand. With the increasing availability of affordable fitness applications to support the monitoring of the lifestyle diseases the demand for the sports and fitness applications is ever-increasing. One can find a wide range of smart wearables including a Smart Watch to count your calories, Wrist-bands to assess and report your sleep pattern and quality, Smart Sneakers to assess your walking speed and pattern and Smart Gloves supporting you with your Golf Swing, to name a few.

6) Mobile Payments

With Google’s Pay Service and Apple’s, Apple Pay, the trend of mobile payments has seen a remarkable surge. The year 2017 alone has witnessed gross mobile payments of more than US$700B globally, an indication that this trend is going to get more popular in the days ahead. Introduced in early 2018, Google’s ‘Pay’ is an app simplifying mobile payments using Android Pay and Google Wallet. This has given way to the trend of replacing the use of debit and credit cards by use of pay based apps in the phone to make payments, proving to be a big push for the mobile-commerce.

7) Blockchain

We all know that Blockchain is the technology behind making the Cryptocurrencies possible. However, on delving deeper we find out that it is much more than that. Blockchain enables us with a corruption-proof digital ledger for the economic transactions with the ability to program the recording of the financial transaction as well as anything else that holds a commercial (or otherwise) value. This implies that Blockchain is one of those disruptive technologies that can go a long way in trasformaing the way we do business or even the way we live. The years to come might witness growing use of this technologies in more ways than we can imagine at this moment.

The other trends include the use of cloud technology to reduce the impact of increasing features and functions on the mobile devices’ internal memory, and to enhance the focus on the security measures to be taken while handling the personal data and confidential information of the users. With the growing innovation in mobile technology, there are always some new mobile trends for us to learn about. These trends get scaled in the industry based on the kind of a problem they solve for us. Want to know which are the latest technology trends applicable in your industry and can impart a competitive edge to your mobile app? Get in touch with the team of mobile technology experts at Carmatec. We would be more than happy to impart our oversight on how you can improve the user experience for your mobile application.