In an increasingly competitive marketplace thriving your business is more difficult if you are not prepared for the future.

Apps have become integral parts of businesses these days that play a substantial role in connecting you with your customers. To sustain your business, thrive amidst the competition, and propel and steer your growth in the right direction, you need to ensure that your apps are future-ready and future-proof.

Here’s how you can make your apps future-proof

The trends in the mobile app development sectors are not only rapidly changing, but also changing at an incredibly fast pace that’s difficult for a lot of businesses to cope with. In the last five years, with the explosion of multiple mobile devices and state-of-the-art technologies, numerous trends have emerged, survived, and changed in a matter of no time. If you need to survive this storm, you must be mindful of the developing trends in the app development sphere so that you can best leverage your resources and technology and get yourself ready for the future. From brainstorming design ideas to launching the app to the market, there is going to be an end-to-end and massive change in the future. 

Here are some key insights you need to stay aware of:

• UX will take a front seat
• Multi experience Development
• Technology takes apps by storm
• Security will be the topmost priority
• Instant Apps become the new normal

User Experience will take a front seat

The future of mobile apps will see an increase in delivering an enhanced and out-of-the-box in-app experience to users.
Google and Apple are redefining their guidelines to ensure that their apps provide an elevated and refined user experience to the customers.

• Apple is working towards making its app market highly professional by removing all the outdated and abandoned apps from the app stores.
• Google enforces strict regulations that compel every app owner to strictly abide by the guidelines of the latest Android versions.

Multi Experience Development

It is studied that the future of mobile apps will be empowered with the practice of delivering experiences to users on different devices and platform variants.

• With the emergence of multi-experience platform development, chat, voice, augmented reality, and wearable devices will see an upsurge in use and popularity.
• Businesses will massively start leveraging on cloud-hosted artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that let them develop robust multi-experience apps.
• As more and more novel devices invade the digital arena, (say smartwatches, wearables, voice-driven hardware devices), the future is about to witness changes in the modes of interactions. Touch, voice recognition, speech to text inputs, face recognition, gestures, natural languages, personalized device nomenclature, etc. will be the popular modes of interaction that engage the users and expand their digital journey. 

Technology takes apps by storm

Here is a list of new-age technologies that are expected to take the mobile app sphere by storm. Knowing this helps you to be at the top of technology and get future-ready.

• Integration of Cloud and IoT (Internet of Things)
• Swift becoming the future of mobile app development
• The permeation of 5G technology
• Cross-platform development becoming the future’s new normal
• Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) becoming common things
• Beacon Technology and blockchain technology
• Wearables, artificial intelligence (AI), more cloud-powered apps, etc.

Instant Apps become the new normal

The next amazing thing is going to be the all-new instant apps. Here’s all that you need to know about instant apps:

• They are readily usable the moment you click the link (URL) without having you to download it on the app stores.
• To people who have qualms in downloading new apps, this is going to be a great option. According to Statista, more than 50% of US users don’t download any new app for more than 30 days in a row.
• This eliminates the threat of losing credibility with poor reviews on the app stores or limiting the app’s features to fit the guidelines of the app stores. Without the hassles of launching apps in the stores, you can still take your apps to the market in the future.
• With secure payments, eCommerce apps will be replaced more with instant apps of this kind that will make the shopping experience seamless, faster, and stress-free.
• With easy integrations with third-party payment apps like Google Pay and Apple Pay, instantaneous mCommerce apps will easily replace traditional downloadable apps. The future is here for those who want to let their customers use their apps on the fly.   

Security will be the topmost priority

Awareness about security will be more in the future like never before in history. Despite eye-catching advancements in technologies, security will continue to remain the first item in anybody’s checklist. Here is how security plays a pivotal role in shaping app development processes in the future:

• The future will necessitate and mandate providing enhanced security features throughout the app market.
• Users are more aware of threats like cyber-attacks and data breaches and apps need to win customers’ trust.
• In the future, not only banking and finance-related apps, even apps meant for personal usage, socializing, entertainment, and fun will see strict security features like professional corporate apps that deal with sensitive information and confidential data. 

Here’s a checklist to ensure safety and security and make your app future-proof:

In the future, security will take high precedence in developing mobile apps. Here’s a checklist for you to ensure your app is future-safe.

1. Implement strong and multifactor authentication

• Enforce strong authentication to prevent easy password guessing.
• Prevent unauthorized access with multi-factor authentication.
• Adopt protective measures like fingerprints, device IDs, combined passwords, PINs, etc.

2. Protect communications with end-to-end encryption

• Encrypt all the communications between the servers and mobile devices.
• Leverage 4096-bit SSL keys and session-based key exchanges to prevent hacking.
• Apart from communication, ensure other sensitive data also.

3. Ensure on-time security patches and updates

• Keep releasing updates in a never-ending succession loop to ensure safety.
• Ensure that all the security patches are applied on time.
• Avoid bugs and fix them on time to prevent and reduce vulnerabilities.

4. Ensure the facility to restore app data against device theft

• Ensure a way that facilitates remote wiping of sensitive data.
• It would be better if data were not stored on mobile devices in the first place.
• Check the feasibility of restoring app data and locking the corporate information.

5. Test apps for malicious behavior

• Eliminate adware and malware by appropriate testing methods.
• Use signature-based scanning tools and virtual sandboxing.
• Perform malware scans on the server more frequently.

6. Adopt the latest encryption technologies

• Never store any data unless it is absolutely necessary.
• Store your files, databases, and datastores in an end-to-end protected/encrypted manner.

7. Check for platform security

• Use a properly secured and controlled platform.
• Restrict access to data on the platform to an as-needed basis.

 8. Prevent data leaks and breach

• Avoid or disable options to download confidential data unless it’s absolutely necessary.
• If your app deals with sensitive information like banking or finance, you can restrict screen captures.

9. Optimize caching to reduce vulnerabilities

• Reduce vulnerability caused by cached data with a password-protected app entry in case your app deals with ultra-sensitive data.
• Automate the process of clearing the cache whenever the device is rebooted. This not only wipes cache-associated threats but also mitigates other security threats. 

10. Protect and isolate application information

• In case your app deals with corporate information, you need to isolate users’ personal data accessed through the mobile device from the app’s corporate information.
• Tricks like using a container-based model will help enhance app security.

With incredible advancements in technology, if you are not prepared for future trends, you will only end up being left behind. I hope this article is of help to you in terms of getting a hang of what’s in store for you. Apart from these predictions, the future of mobile apps is here to witness advanced trends like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), internet of things (IoT), chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, accelerated mobile pages (AMP), natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), mCommerce, cloud-based platforms, etc. To learn more about future trends, here is an article that explains more in detail. Our upcoming chapters walk you through the best practices involved in launching your app to the market and maintaining them on the app stores. 

If you want to get a free consultation on how to develop your app successfully or how to choose the best platform to develop your apps, feel free to get in touch with us. We would love to help you.  At Siam Computing, a team of expert app developers, designers, strategists, technology enthusiasts, customer happiness specialists, mobile app experts, etc. work together with spirit and rigorousness to deliver adept and robust mobile solutions customized to your business needs. With decades of expertise in app development technology, we have delivered numerous mobile apps to a wide spectrum of local and international clients.