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.
The best way to market to your mobile application users just might be through push notifications. 9 of the Top 10 in the 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500 use push notifications as part of their program to market to consumers, making push notifications the most-used feature among that group. Digging deeper we find that 136 of the 500 use push notifications.
Push notification use continues to grow with mobile applications and are something you should discuss with your mobile application developer. A study published this past Spring by OtherLevels found that the number of retail apps utilizing push notifications increased 48 percent from 2012 to 2013. Additionally the study went on to further detail that 66 percent of the top 100 retailers in the study with a mobile applications utilized push notifications.
Beyond just being popular amount top retail companies with mobile applications, push notifications have been shown to increase engagement and retention among consumers. In a study from Urban Airship, they detail that consumers who opted-in to push notifications on retail oriented mobile apps generated 40 percent more monthly app opens. The average increase in engagement across a spectrum of industries including media, retail, entertainment, games and sports was 26 percent.
Looking at data gathered by Localytics, they found that users who enable push notifications have a 3X higher retention rate compared to users who disable them.
How do you make your push notifications more productive?
“It’s important to ask users for their preferences when you use push notifications,” states Kimber Johnson, Managing Director, Vanity Point. “This allows you to personalize delivery. Additionally, we encourage our client’s to use push notifications for useful information and not just advertisements. Useful information will create a click but spamming users with ads or frivolous information will just have them deleting your application or opting out of your push notification program.”
As we watch the growth of smartphones sales it has been clear that this has not been solely a hardware related issue. The mobile applications and features available on the various systems are as much or more a part of the decision process than the hardware itself. Mobile application developers have helped push the industry as well.
“When asked about the main reason behind a handset choice, functionality comes up as the most important factor. Between 44% and 48% of buyers, depending on market, are more interested in functionality than the actual brand of a phone” states Chris Smith, BGR.
According to a new whitepaper from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, in the U.S., smartphone market penetration stood at 55 percent in the first quarter of 2014 and smartphone sales were 76 percent of all mobile phone sales.
This is generally a sophisticated market that does its homework. “As much as US consumers can be familiar with the term ‘smartphone,’” the report mentions, “they still do their due diligence before purchasing their devices. Only 30% of buyers in Q1 2014 did not conduct any research before buying a smartphone.”
For the 70 percent of consumers who do research prior to their purchase, personal recommendations and advice are huge influences, “One fifth of consumers interacted with store sales assistants before going back into a store to buy, and one quarter sought advice from friends.”