Need-to-Know Mobile App Development Trends

Mobile apps are constantly evolving. In the first quarter of 2019, there were 2.6 million Android apps and 2.2 million iOS apps—and that’s just the number of apps available for public consumption!

More and more enterprises also are developing apps for in-house use as well. But what functionalities are available? What can your enterprise-wide app do for you?

If you are setting out to create a new application, you need to have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the mobile app world: what’s current, what kinds of developments are necessary to set your app apart from the competition and what will best help your team.

Here’s what happening in the world of mobile app development:

Internet of Things Integration

The revenue from the technology that’s associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2025. Can your mobile app keep up?

The IoT isn’t just for pedometers, roving vacuums, door cams and thermostats anymore; it also can include things like glucose monitoring and insulin delivery for patients with diabetes, smart inhalers, and smart supply chain management. Whatever it is, the IoT is taking over, and with each new wearable app and smart device comes a lot of data.

Couchbase Mobile IoT data management can help you keep track of how your IoT data and devices are being used, with RESTful data to keep the line of communication going strong no matter what. How does it accomplish this?

• You can use Couchbase to keep track of operational data across users, sessions and jobs in real time.
• You use memory-centric architecture, integrated cache and global replication, which means that data is highly available and quickly ingested.
• With Couchbase, you can manage millions of endpoints and devices and scale to any number of users.
• You can implement big data technologies like Hadoop, Spark and Kafka to analyze data quickly and accelerate IoT workloads.

Couchbase Mobile for IoT allows you to scale and simplify your data management procedures. Couchbase can sync data from the network’s edge to the cloud so you can capture billions of data points at countless endpoints. It even captures unstructured IoT data at the edge, so there is seamless data sharing, always-on availability and connectivity no matter the circumstances, online or offline.

Mobile Commerce

By the end of 2021, it’s estimated that 72.9 percent of e-commerce sales will come from mobile devices, and a large player in mobile e-commerce is the mobile commerce app. Large retailers and small business owners alike are leveraging the power of mobile apps to connect with customers.

Online retailers and business owners are in constant competition with Amazon. To be able to keep up, you need an app to keep you in the competition. Why is this? Conversion rates are more than three times higher on a mobile app than they are the mobile web.

Couchbase Mobile extends the e-commerce server to the network edge and offers integrated mobile capabilities to support omnichannel experiences so your online store feels like your app and vice versa. This even includes things like a mobile retail catalog.

Exceptional App Security

In an increasingly mobile world, everyone is tired of the growing list of data breaches. In 2019 alone, there were over 22 major security breaches. Small businesses and large multinational corporations alike fall prey to cyber attacks, so mobile app developers are beefing up their mobile app security as a way to protect their enterprise systems, reassure consumers and keep data safe.

For those looking to build in the Couchbase world, Couchbase Mobile has built-in, enterprise-level security, which includes the following features that keep with security best practices that are recommended for mobile app developers:

• User authentication
• User- and role-based data access control
• Secure transport over TLS
• 256-bit AES full database encryption

Cantle Tech can help you set up a Couchbase Mobile app where you have the power to safeguard data with built-in enterprise-grade security from the cloud to the network’s edge, and you can manage access control and monitor the security of your data whether it’s online or offline.

Field Service Applications

Enterprise-level employee apps are on the rise, and these need to work online or in the field. This is why more and more apps are being developed to be armed with responsive applications that work all the time regardless of network availability. Edge computing everywhere is on the rise; its value in 2019 was $3.5 billion, and experts believe that enterprises will be spending as much as 30 percent of their IT budget on edge computing over the next three years.

This can prove to be a challenge for some apps, especially if the solution involves pulling data from multiple sources into a single platform and then “edgifying” the data or making it available for both on- and offline use.

Couchbase Mobile is focusing many of its efforts on edge computing with field service options for employee and enterprise-level applications. What does this include?

• Scalability, flexibility and performance for user profiles that include personal information, activity logs, smart scheduling, job status, preferences and more.
• The ability to capture, route and synchronize critical business data between agents in the field and applications in the cloud, available offline with real-time syncs.
• Couchbase allows you to manage devices and applications, even if they are running on thousands of endpoints. You also can scale to support any number of users and sync updates automatically in the background when the network is available for a faster, more seamless user experience on the network or off.

Real-Time Computing

The latest trend in big data is real-time computing to provide your enterprise with immediate insight. The best way to achieve this? RESTful data makes it easy to store and transmit this data efficiently.

Real-time computing means that employees always have access to real-time usability, which is workable even in intermittent network connectivity. How is this achieved? RESTful development keeps data usage low, because Couchbase Mobile actively triages when and where the data is moved—which only happens when the network is available.

Remember, these real-time mobile apps aren’t just created for cell phones, even remote autonomous systems. Cantle Tech can help you use Couchbase for all kinds of devices. These include lightweight, frequently autonomous, external service nodes that can be used in both simple and complex systems. We’ve helped bring this real-time usability to all kinds of industries from oil sites to sensor systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles and handheld field devices.

Cantle Tech can help you use Couchbase to query, aggregate and report on operational statistics for all users with all sessions in real-time. This helps develop your dashboards, alerts, trends and even incident management.

Here at Cantle Tech, we know what functions are available and on the rise and which ones to implement in your business’ app, whether it’s a customer-based e-commerce app or an IoT service node on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Using our extensive Couchbase expertise, we can help deliver an app that’s secure, efficient and always available, one with stellar front-end optics and the right coding to back it up.

Just take a look at this case study of how we did the impossible and used Couchbase to build a beautiful, flexible, secured app in record time. Whatever you need, consider it done.

Want to learn more about how Cantle Tech can deliver of-the-moment mobile app technology via Couchbase? Contact us today!