Mobile developments have always been a fierce highly competitive market and leveraging strategic technology trends would be the right thing if software developers want to keep their heads above water. The industry leaders as well as analysts have presented their findings about mobile developments for 2015. The most important mobile app predictions for 2015 are here.
1. Bursty, spontaneous, varied by device, simultaneous. What is meant? You ask. Forrester analysts write about micro-moments. They stress the shift from apps, and toward more contextually relevant micro-moments, delivered across families of devices, that are personalized to anticipate unique customer needs.
Under micro-moments approach, one means brief interactions where developers can get customers’ attention and anticipate their needs. In other words, mobile apps are forecasted to engage users in 5-10 seconds interactions many times a day while developers will set a priority on notifications, widgets and cross-device interactions.
Moreover, mobile software development companies are expected to develop mobile apps for multiple platforms. Standalone apps as well as programs for a singular device will be offside. Ecosystems and accessories are to magnetize users in 2015. Developers are predicted to ensure their app will work on every device instead of ignoring the fragmentation of devices and platforms. Universalism of mobile apps will be the right thing in 2015 because according to another Forrester research 90% of users surveyed who own multiple devices start a task on one device and finish it on another and, over 50% of those users reported using more than one device at the same time for complementary activities like texting or tweeting while watching something. Gartner’s predicts the same thing: there will be a need to serve mobile users in diverse contexts and environments. Here, we should stress the word ecosystem as a key notion of mobile app predictions for 2015. Summing it all up, mobile developers should work on apps for a connected ecosystem of devices.
As an example, analysts refer to the following: these very micro-moments are currently being presented by Apple and Google through their platform features like Now and iOS8 extensions. These have APIs, which allow users to put contextually relevant data into platform mobile services, e.g. HomeKit.
2. Users will go shopping mobile more. M-commerce as well as mobile payments will skyrocket. In 2011, Gartner’s predicted that the tipping point in the shift from e-commerce to m-commerce would fall onto 2015. So, what do we have? Did you know that 90% of people shopped mobile on Black Friday 2014?
Mobile sites of online retailers seem to continue their global march in 2015. Thus, Gartner’s predicts that by 2017 U.S. customer’™ mobile engagement behavior will drive mobile commerce revenue in the U.S. to 50 percent of U.S. digital commerce revenue.
According to other sources, m-commerce is expected to boost from $133 billion in 2013 to more than $516 billion by 2017. (Source: Digi Capital). Why? Retailers and brands have recognized the power of barcode scanning, for instance, and still manage to engage consumers with their marketing arsenal.
As for mobile payments in particular, retailers upgrade payment terminals, the market provides opportunities for contactless payment integration with more venture capital flowing to the market. All the hot points will enable mobile payments to grow and evolve. In 2015, we won’t go without mobile payments market battles: Apple Pay will continue to grow; Google will intensify the adoption of its NFC-enabled Google Wallet while competitors will undertake similar efforts with other services.
3. Mobile advertising will continue to drive incomes. Facebook reports that in 2014 62% of its revenue from mobile ads in Q2 and global mobile ad spending increased 75% to nearly $32 billion that’s one-quarter of the digital ad spend for the entire world.
2015 is to provide this industry with necessary conditions for growth; mainly mobile advertising will be accelerated by provider consolidation, new targeting technologies, measurement standardization.
According to Gartner’s, the market is expected to grow to $41.9 billion by 2017. Gartner said that display formats will make up most of the revenue, but video will show the highest growth. Mobile advertising will also continue to balloon with native advertising and mobile programmatic apps shaping the industry’s outlook in 2015.
4. UI and UX mobile predictions. First, flat design here is to win. There is something esthetic in each of us, that’s why we do love things visually. In this respect, we’ll see the rise of flat design in 2015, as we want to get a small feeling of context for our 2 dimensional flat digital devices.
Apart from it, visual appeal drives a shift to beautiful web typography. Type foundries are offering good web font kits at good prices that’s why beautiful typography usage will spread.
Another thing that will make mobile UX prettier will be UI cards. Their layout is extremely important and effective for conveying content. UI cards make it easy for users to explore services, products, news, etc. Thus, users and developers will take advantage of these cards more and more because their small size allows easy integration for responsive layouts.
No experience exists without context any more that is why delivering users relevant content will be the corner stone of mobile UX trends for 2015. Under the circumstances when due to marketing and communication, one can get all the information about users’ preferences, habits, location, hobbies, etc., it’s a must to give an immediate and relevant response to users. Contextual mobile UX will be the Holy Grail for developers and the object of their pro-activity in 2015.
For the final point, we’ve prepared something that is extremely crucial for every human being. Due to mobile and wearable devices, health and nutrition monitoring will achieve an unprecedented rise. Deployment of some kinds of mobile sensors to monitor your body in real time will grow and be more and more of use in 2015.
According to the Guardian, we’ll see a panoply of products for health about to be launched. After all, mobile battles won’t come only to battles for ecosystems and platforms. Google Glasses are not casted in metal and not set in stone. With the Apples’ Watch to go on sale in spring, the battle for the market of wearables is just about to begin. By the way, in 2014 LG, Samsung and Motorola also announced smartwatches. Meanwhile, Microsoft counts on health as well, showing its Band, a wrist-mounted health sensor. What other wearables and mobile devices manage to get under our skin, we’ll see soon.
As a summary, we would offer you to consider the following abstract from Gartner’s: Mobile apps will continue to undergo a high rate of change over the next few years with short development cycles, the emergence of rapid development tools and improved interactions with voice. It makes everybody to expect more than ever from the mobile market in 2015. Let’s see what we shall get.
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Industries and Technology Areas
Industries: IT
Technology Areas: software development, mobile application development, iOS 8
