While the enterprise mobile development platforms market is is in near constant flux, there are a few clues that can give us insight as to what lies in store for us in 2017. This past year has seen a greater demand for quality enterprise mobile applications than ever before. With the number of smartphone users expected to increase from 4.61 billion this past year to 4.77 billion in 2017, your organization should be looking into the latest trends if you plan to take app development seriously in the coming year.
The Cloud Meets Mobile App Development
It’s often been a challenge for developers to build mobile applications that work on multiple mobile devices. With “Bring Your Own Device” struggles still relevant for many businesses, one possibility to bypass this issue, would be to move applications containing sensitive corporate data into the cloud. This would provide employees to use mobile applications from all of their corporate devices without administrators needing to worry about the data falling into the wrong hands in the case of a lost device. This cloud based approach to mobile applications should bring efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness to businesses.
The Internet of Things 
The Internet of Things is already massively popular and its only expected to keep growing. As a mater of fact, it’s expected that by 2020, the number of connected devices will reach 21 million worldwide, with some experts even doubling that estimate. Because smartphones will remain the bridge between users and their connected things, it’s important to develop IoT applications that are secure and capable of protecting user data.
Increase in Mobile Enterprises
It’s recently been reported that by 2017, half of all US companies will be using at least ten mobile enterprise applications to manage business processes and maintain customer relations. Gartner is urging vendors to focus on retention strategies. By providing real value to customers, businesses will be more likely to retain their customers. Enterprise application integration will also be a major trend with a majority of employees using at least three different devices.
Hybrid Apps
With a growing number of businesses providing BYOD systems at their office, organizations are seeing a massive increase in the number of devices being used for accessing corporate information. Between tablets, desktops, and smartphones, developers need to ensue that their designs are responsive to the display of the device. With that being said, employers are increasingly opting for a native application approach to development; and while native does come with its advantages, many companies simply can’t afford native development, due to its time intensive nature.
Instead businesses are looking to use a hybrid application approach instead. For those of you who are not aware, an HTML5 hybrid application is a web-based application that’s wrapped within a native container using a number of different mobile application development platforms. When a developer uses hybrid, the application is developed in HTML, CSS, and Javascript but are wrapped within a framework and are available for download. By working with this format, developers can build an application in HTML and then apply the code to a number of other operating systems, including iOS, Android. While mobile applications are becoming even more popular, it’s important not to overlook web applications. Coding a web based application from a hybrid approach is fairly simple in that much of the code can be reused.
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- 5 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Mobile App Developer - August 22, 2017
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Doug Atkinson
An entrepreneur and executive with a passion for enterprise technology, Doug founded Solutions Review in 2012. He has previously served as a newspaper boy, a McDonald's grill cook, a bartender, a political consultant, a web developer, the VP of Sales for e-Dialog - a digital marketing agency - and as Special Assistant to Governor William Weld of Massachusetts.
- 5 Questions to Ask When Hiring a Mobile App Developer - August 22, 2017
- The Top 10 User Experience Blogs You Need to Follow in 2017 - July 17, 2017
- Solutions Review Presents: The User Interface Hall of Shame - July 13, 2017
