The Best Mobile Technologies So Far

Mobile development is now a crucial part for many businesses today. Without mobile-optimized solutions, businesses undoubtedly risk losing thousands of customers and lagging behind their competition.

The mass adoption of mobile technologies has led to the incredible growth of the mobile app industry, giving users a wide range of options. Today, you can find a mobile app for almost everything ranging from non-gamstop poker sites to online shopping, money transfer, etc. Here are the hottest mobile technologies shaping the industry’s future.

Table of Contents

1. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been a major part of the mobile industry since 2017 when Apple started allowing developers to integrate Siri voice assistant in their applications. That encouraged AI’s mass adoption and integration alongside machine learning algorithms in different fields.

Here are popular use cases of artificial intelligence in the mobile industry:

Personalized recommendations and ads in eCommerce
Virtual personal assistants and chatbots in the service industry
Facial and motion detection apps for surveillance
Voice recognition apps for entertainment, gaming and hands-free communication
Medical software that gives a diagnosis and suggests treatment
Financial forecasting solutions

With artificial intelligence, mobile applications can analyze visual and textual data, recognize voice commands, anticipate user behavior, and make recommendations. As such, there’s fierce competition between mobile developers who want their smartphones to feature ML and AI elements.

2. Virtual reality and augmented reality

More apps are incorporating AR and VR features, and the trend isn’t going away soon. According to research, the mobile AR market was worth about $10.7 billion, and it’s expected to reach $230.6 billion by 2027.

Mobile applications that use VR/AR offer amazing opportunities by enhancing physical environments with digital objects, improving the user experience. These technologies were common in the video gaming market years ago, but the mobile app development industry is now leveraging VR and AR for more practical purposes like:

Navigation
Object measurement
Education
User manuals
Interior design

Smartphone manufacturers are also increasingly producing AR-enabled devices. In fact, it’s conservatively estimated that there were a billion android and 500+ million iOS devices that could support augmented reality.

3. Mobile payments

Mobile payments are among the most rapidly growing financial markets thanks to the rise of eCommerce and online gambling. According to market experts, mobile payment users significantly increased to reach 2.3 billion in 2020 from 1.4 billion in 2019. That was primarily boosted by people’s avoidance of using cash payments during the lockdown.

In addition to the thousands of banking applications on the market, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay, PayPal, Zelle and WeChatPay are the most used payment apps. These mobile payment applications help users perform financial transactions more easily, quickly, and from anywhere.

4. Mobile IoT apps

The IoT is now mainstream in many industries, ranging from agriculture and healthcare to transportation and manufacturing. That has increased the development of IoT mobile apps that bridge the gap between people and smartphones.

IoT applications are tools for remotely managing connected devices to allow users to:

Analyze data, generate reports and build charts
Monitor readings of sensors and mobile devices
Manage mobile devices (open/close, configure, trigger notifications, turn on/off and more)

IoT applications are also beneficial for customer-oriented solutions in wearables, smart home appliances and traffic sensors. They’re also great for enterprise-grade management in gas and oil networks, autonomous cars and railway lines.

5. 5G Connectivity

5G networks are transforming the mobile app development market. These networks have made it easier to implement advanced technologies like AI, IoT, cloud computing and AR into mobile devices.

5G connectivity delivers four main advantages to mobile solutions, including:

Low latency – highly reliable low latency
Speed – 5G networks are 100 faster than 4G networks.
Connectivity – With 5G networks, it’s possible to connect about a million mobile devices, unlike the thousands that 4G networks support. That created new opportunities for the rise of the internet of things applications.
Bandwidth – 5G networks offer excellent connectivity while working with high, mid and low bands.

6. Cloud-based mobile apps

Mobile applications that feature advanced technologies like machine learning, IoT and artificial intelligence require a lot of storage in a smartphone’s internal memory. However, a gigabyte-sized application isn’t an ideal choice for users.

Cloud computing solves this problem by using remote servers for the required storage space for an app to function seamlessly without affecting a smartphone’s internal memory. This technology means: