Mobile applications need to offer innovative solutions to remain competitive as basic capabilities are no longer sufficient. Businesses use mobile to provide improved services and the mobile landscape is constantly evolving, requiring a focus on security, performance, and APIs. Key trends include location-based services, near field communication, and mobile smart objects. Developers must strengthen competencies like security, performance optimization, and API development to ensure apps can scale with trends. While native device access remains important, mobile apps also increasingly connect to backend services and data sources.

1. Stay on top of today’s and tomorrow’s mobile app trends.
It’s time to go beyond basic mobile apps and start offering innovative and valuable solutions.
The days of offering baseline mobile capabilities such as email, enterprise storage, and collaboration are behind us. Today, businesses are looking at mobile as a means of offering improved and innovative
business services and capabilities to remain competitive.
The mobile landscape is continually evolving. It is hard to predict which trends will make a significant impact and difficult to prepare for them.
Remain competitive in your industry by enabling today’s trending functionalities in your mobile applications.
The implementation and use of today’s mobile trends is highly susceptible to change. Focus on your mobile security, performance optimization, and API development competencies to remain relevant with
company standards, regulations, SLAs, and other non-functional requirements. This helps ensure your mobile platform can scale appropriately to accommodate today’s and tomorrow’s trends.
While the web offers a flexible platform, many of today’s mobile applications continue to leverage native device hardware that is not accessible through web APIs (e.g. GPS, NFC readers, and cameras) or the
browser. Understanding the configuration and testing of device hardware and related APIs (provided by Mobile Enterprise Application Platform or OS vendors) continues to remain relevant.
Info-Tech has chosen three trending mobile technologies making significant strides in the mobile industry today.
Location-Based Services (LBS) – “76% of users who use location-sharing say it helps them receive more meaningful content and 73% rate this feature as useful.” - 2014 Mobile Behavior Report, Salesforce
Marketing Cloud, 2014.
Near Field Communication (NFC) – “Technology in the mobile industry has been moving towards the integration of NFC technology in mobile commerce. This trend opened up many mobile commerce channels
that will allow businesses to conduct a huge variety of transactions using NFC technology integrated on mobile devices.” - Gabriella Arcese, Gui Campagna, et al. Near Field Communication: Technology and Market
Trends. Technologies 2014. ISSN 227-7080. Sept 2014.
Mobile Smart Objects (MSO) – “Approximately half of IT decision makers have high interest in apps for industrial controls, automotive, and home automation markets. Survey respondents seem in large measure
to have embraced a vision of smart homes, cars, cities, factory floors, and workplaces.” - Q3 2014 Mobile Trends Report, Appcelerator, 2014.
Poor competencies weaken your app’s integrity – strengthen your security, performance, and API dev practices
Determination of App Vulnerability (Competency: Mobile Secure Development)
46% of mobile iOS and Android apps use encryption improperly.
52% of security issues were a result of insecure client-side operations.
74% of issues were due to unnecessary permissions.
80% of issues were due to untrusted content.
Source: Cyber risk report 2013, HP, 2014.
Bottom line: By not addressing security, you risk stolen intellectual property, damages to enterprise systems, and privacy lawsuits filed by angry end users.
Achieving Desktop-Like Performance (Competency: Mobile Performance Optimization)
85% of mobile users expect pages to load as fast or faster than they load on the desktop.
Slow pages are the number one issue that mobile users complain about – ranking even higher than site crashes.
When faced with negative mobile experiences, 33% of users will go to a competitor’s site and 30% will never return.
Source: 2014 State of the Union: Mobile Ecommerce Performance, Radware, 2014.
Bottom line: Delivering the best mobile experience with readily available information is critical to the retention of end users.
Integrating Reliably with Backend and Web Services (Competency: API Development)
77% of respondents indicated they are connecting their mobile apps to custom web services and 32% to enterprise content management.
90% of developers said it was likely or very likely that connecting mobile apps to both public and enterprise data sources would become the norm.
Source: Q3 2014 Mobile Trends Report, Appcelerator, 2014.
Bottom line: Mobile applications are no longer standalone client-side tools. Mobile’s value is dictated by the data and services they can access and use.

10. http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/stay-on-top-of-today-s-and-
tomorrow-s-mobile-app-trends