5 Hot Mobile Application Trends For 2015

Mobile app development is a rapidly growing industry that continues to evolve year each year. In 2014, we saw incredible growth in the industry. Businesses looking to improve their current mobile offering or looking to hire an iPhone application developer or Android app developer should be sure to consider these trends when starting their project.

User Experience

User experience will become even more important in 2015. With the number of smart phones, tablets and mobile applications growing every day, user experience becomes an even more important consideration. With more and more apps to choose from, businesses releasing mobile applications need to be careful not to turn customers away with an app with a poor user experience. Good usability can be worth its weight in gold in the mobile app world.

Mobile Payments

With powerful sales numbers coming out of countries all around the world like 40% of retail e-commerce sales in the UK in 2014 being made on a smartphone or tablet (BizReport), mobile is more important than ever to businesses. Using a mobile phone to pay instead of debit or credit cards will make rapid growth over 2015 and businesses not prepared to accept payments via this method will find themselves losing business.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is growing incredibly rapidly with more and more people connecting more devices every day.  The application market will further evolve as integration with additional devices continues and clever companies take advantages of the many new opportunities.

Wearables

The Apple Watch is coming to market in less than a month and developers need to consider creating apps for not only the iPhone and iPad but also the Apple Watch and other wearable devices. Developers can extend their app’s functionality to work with Apple’s wearable device and increase engagement with their audience.  While most of applications for wearable devices so far have focused on health care and fitness, that is about to change this year, as we will see businesses releasing apps to improve productivity.

Beacons

With beacon technology, location based services become more powerful than ever.  Apple’s offering iBeacon extends location services for those with iOS devices. With iBeacons, iOS app developers and retailers can target customers in a specific location. Apps interacting with iBeacon will be on the rise in 2015. Retail establishments and other businesses are installing iBeacons to share information with users with Apple devices. Beacons will change the providing of locally-focused content. Businesses should focus on creating apps utilizing this technology to provide information and offers to consumers.