The App Development Roadmap 2020
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The App Development Roadmap 2020 What to consider when it comes to developing or commissioning a world-class app in 2020 and beyond. 1 Foreword What makes a great app? Fulfilling your customer’s need So what’s changing? As is the case with any digital and a great user experience are the two biggest traits economy, the app marketplace is constantly evolving your app needs to demonstrate, but there’s a lot more to with new trends, new rules, new tools and new players. think about as the fast moving app economy continues These constant changes impact the way you have to to evolve. Whether you’re launching or running an approach building, launching, marketing and maintaining existing app that is consumer facing or adding value to your app. This report will explore the important changes users within your business, there are a lot of questions that have taken place in 2019 and will continue to that you need to be asking when it comes to ensuring influence the world of app development in 2020 your app has a successful impact. and beyond. How can you ensure your app gets the prominent For anybody facing the increasingly challenging task position it deserves in the app store chart? How can of commissioning or running a successful app, The you be certain you’re providing a world-class user App Development Roadmap 2020 will serve as your experience? And how can you make sure users continue trusty guide when it comes to what to consider and to open and engage with your app instead of dropping how to think ahead to ensure your app is delivering off or, worse, removing it from their device? Which new on your business goals as well as generating a buzz technologies and middlewares are worth investing your and achieving strong downloads and increasing time in and which are worth bypassing completely? For engagement. We have highlighted four key areas those who aren’t at the forefront of app development, we believe you need to be focussed on as we move those questions can be difficult to answer, especially at a into 2020. time when the app marketplace is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Rob Sandbach Managing Director, Indiespring Contents 1. Fragmentation of the marketplace and devices 3 2. Adoption and improvement of mobile analytical tools 4 3. Cross platform app development changing the game 5 4. Growing awareness and driving user engagement 6 5. Customer insights 7 The App Development Roadmap 2020 2 1. Fragmentation of the marketplace The app marketplace isn’t as simple as it once was. For some time Apple and Android have been the only platforms app owners have had to consider but this is all beginning to change, particularly on the Android side of things. Following Huawei’s ban from the Google Play Store, the Chinese technology giant is launching its own operating system named HarmonyOS complete with its own app store. Amazon has also taken baby steps towards launching its own app store for Kindle and a wider Amazon app store could create further fragmentation down the line. Compared to Apple, Google has an obvious problem curbing fragmentation, in the Android Ecosystem. Third party manufacturers that have their own app stores - including the likes of Samsung, Sony and LG - are driving that fragmentation but Google’s ‘Project Mainline’ aims to improve this by enabling security, privacy and consistency to be updated through its Play Store. The broadening of the marketplace and the emergence of different platforms are factors that now have to be taken into consideration when it comes to app development, not only to ensure they’re available to smartphone users across all platforms but also to ensure they are providing the best possible user Apple has demonstrated, and Apple tightening its experience which takes advantage of the native benefits policies even further. on each platform. Developers are having to think about these policies It’s not just the marketplace that’s becoming more and how the apps they build comply across different fragmented. The proliferation of new devices that platforms. For example, apps that are required to run apps are accessed through should also be taken into constantly in the background can be removed from consideration as users adopt these devices. Developers the app store due to excessive battery usage. Being should be beginning to think about smart speakers, aware of these less documented limitations will be smart televisions, connected cars, home assistants critical when adding new features or bringing innovative and wearables. How users want and need to interact solutions to market. with apps through the growing range of devices is adding increasing complexity to app development All of these elements are driving the fragmentation of with different interfaces, expectations and the app marketplace and developers have already had implementation possibilities. to take a lot more into consideration in 2019. In 2020 it’s likely the rate of fragmentation will only intensify as the On top of all of this, changing app store policies are distance between the various operating systems, app bringing greater complexity and uncertainty to the stores and device types grows wider. App owners will marketplace. What is and isn’t allowed on different have to ensure they’re partnered with developers who platforms is frequently changing with Google updating are fully clued up when it comes to the fast-changing its policies to be more in-line with the stringent policies development of the app marketplace. The App Development Roadmap 2020 3 2. Maturing of mobile analytical tools It’s widely accepted that mobile apps are required to be from the very outset of building and testing an app to simple to use, but a world class user experience can’t help iron out any bugs before its release. New bugs be realised if you’re not able to monitor and analyse can be a common occurrence as apps evolve and the performance of the app “in the field”. Without become updated with new features and upgrades, so performance analytics and crash notifications, the ongoing performance and crash monitoring is essential quality of the user experience can quickly deteriorate and throughout any app’s lifespan. if you as the owner of the app aren’t aware, you cannot act quickly to resolve the issues that are impacting While Firebase is one popular example of a performance the experience. If those issues aren’t swiftly resolved, analytics platform, there are numerous different users will become frustrated which can very quickly solutions available such as Amplitude, Mixpanel and lead to them ceasing to engage and using a competitor Keen. Moving forward, it will pay to ensure the solution app instead. you’ve chosen to help manage and maintain your app’s performance is one of the front runners as these will There’s a growing variety of multiplatform solutions that be the ones that become the de-facto solutions over provide performance analytics and these will become the coming years and will ensure the best possible user increasingly crucial to monitoring and maintaining experience within your app. a great user experience. Solutions like Google’s Firebase provide a range of tools that essentially track A secondary consideration is being sure your app performance, provide tools to test alternative development team and environment is setup to support implementations and notify the app owner when the the rapid releases required to really benefit from the app crashes on any user’s device, providing insight into “test-measure-implement” loop. There is no value in what has gone wrong and why. These tools support analysis that isn’t followed up with action. a “test-measure-implement” loop that allows apps to iterate quickly with data driven decision making which keeps them ahead of the competition. Protecting the user experience in this way keeps engagement rates healthy and avoids a flurry of bad reviews on the app store. Performance and analytics tools should be used of target of month of type ome About ervices isting ew roducts About Contact Page views ounce eads The App Development Roadmap 2020 4 3. Cross platform app development changing the game Cross platform app development has matured as a A further benefit of the cross-platform approach is cost-effective and less complex way of developing apps faster speed to market which supports the modern agile for both Apple and Android’s platforms compared to development methodology and iterative development. native development. Native development requires the Cross platform developers working with cross platform same app to be built from scratch for each platform app solutions are able to bring new products and which is a longer, more expensive and more complex features to all platforms more quickly. The previous process that might not be required for most applications challenges with cross platform development are being in 2020. As the app marketplace continues to fragment, eroded away as devices become more powerful and cross-platform development will become increasingly the technology matures. Download sizes become less popular as an alternative to developing the same app of an issue as 5G becomes the norm and poor app over and over for each platform, especially as new performance is negated with more powerful devices and platforms begin to emerge and the technologies mature now native user interfaces are possible whilst sharing all to lessen the performance and interface implications other code between platforms. previously present. There is an emerging movement of developers building Cross Platform App solutions such as Xamarin & world class apps through a hybrid approach using native React Native are the enablers of the cross platform interfaces on-top of a shared codebase, meaning the approach.