Hi, I'm Anna Pomazanova, the iOS Developer at
Suppose you don’t know which framework is better to choose for improving your skill. Or perhaps you’re just looking in the iOS direction and you want to have in-demand skills when you enter the field. Or maybe you’re planning to launch a startup in a trending industry or area. If any of these is the case for you, this article will be helpful. It doesn't matter if you’re an experienced developer or are just starting to get interested in mobile development — you always need to improve the quality of your code and its optimization. Moreover, you need to understand why you are creating IT products in general, following trends, and studying technologies in the spirit of the times.
To understand which technologies to focus on, I suggest considering the main directions in
Technologies are rapidly developing, and they become outdated very quickly. To stay at the top of their game, developers need to constantly improve, replenish their knowledge and skills, and keep abreast of new products in the IT industry. Mobile devices are no longer just about communication or entertainment.
Modern gadgets have firmly entered our lives and become an integral part of them. What makes them essential and irreplaceable is the so-called "stuffing"—those applications that teach and develop us, solve problems and help monitor our health, calm and entertain, and allow us to spend and earn. If we approach this from a business point of view, then the developed product should help carry out our daily affairs and do it faster and better than competitors. Users must know how much, in what moments, and for what purposes their personal data is used in a particular application.
Health Apps
We live in the frantic pace of modern life and sometimes completely forget to take care of ourselves. This is when wellness applications come to the rescue. These include apps for tracking water intake, calorie counters, automated diet adjustments based on health and biometric parameters, medication apps and health diaries, fitness trackers, hygiene assistants, and more.
An interesting fact: one of these apps,
Apple Health
Among wellness software, health-related apps hold a special place. Of course, this is facilitated by the trend for a healthy lifestyle and fashionable gadgets to monitor the state of your body, as well as the presence of powerful and constantly operating mobile devices capable of storing and processing information (for example, sensors for measuring the quality of sleep, heart rate, blood sugar, and oxygen levels and others). Accordingly, all this data needs to be aggregated, stored, and processed somewhere.
HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit
For developers, Apple also introduced solutions for working with medical data in the HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit frameworks.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, health-related apps have become even more popular. The situation has brought together two constantly competing tech giants — Apple and Google — who jointly developed__contact tracing technology__ to track physical contact with those infected by COVID-19.
Video Communication
The call "Stay Home, Be Safe" has changed how we work and communicate. It turned out that many things can be done remotely without sacrificing much efficiency and quality.
For example, video calling software has become one of the most in-demand tools in 2020 and is maintaining popularity. Below are some of the more popular video communication apps.
FaceTime & SharePlay
The popularity of video calling apps has pushed Apple to modernize
Apple claims that for more natural conversation, individual voices will sound as if they are coming from the direction each person is positioned on the screen, thanks to spatial audio technology. In addition, the crystal transparent noise cancellation mode will muffle all extraneous noises, including the annoying neighbor's drill. All this is possible with the help of the new
Internet of Things (IoT)
In the past, the concept of IoT was rarely seen in everyday life. Now, this technology is everywhere: in houses, offices, on the street, even in the small village where my grandmother lives. So many people have smart devices, from fitness trackers and robotic vacuum cleaners to entire systems with sensors and devices throughout the apartment. Their demand grows every year, so IoT app development is a promising niche.
If not in our smartphones, where else will we look at data from our smart toothbrushes? And sometimes, a person does not even need to operate the device—many things are fully automated. Take the smart home as an example — what if you forgot to turn off the iron? Catastrophe! But with smart home technology, you don't have to worry: the iron will turn off automatically as soon as you close the door behind you. In addition, IoT technologies are widely used in industry, agriculture, healthcare, energy, and urban management.
Apple Home & HomeKit
Usually, an IoT system consists of devices with sensors and a cloud platform to which they are connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and/or LAN. Devices collect data and send it to the cloud, and the application processes it. IoT apps allow you to visualize data, track metrics, and manage connected devices.
On-demand Apps
On-demand apps are rapidly gaining popularity. Whereas before the phrase "I want it here and now" concerned mainly pizza delivery and calling a taxi, now it applies to a wide variety of areas. Among them: courier services, shops, services like "washing at home" or "husband for an hour," and beauty salons. All of these can provide you services practically anywhere. Below are some more examples of popular on-demand frameworks and apps.
CoreLocation
Mobile devices have taught users that they are no longer tied to their homes or workplaces. Almost everything has become virtual — available anytime, anywhere. Smartphones have made it easy for us to communicate our location. Telling the whole world exactly where you are has become a common thing, and in this case, it becomes easier to report this information to many services.
M-commerce applications
M-commerce is traded through mobile apps or mobile websites. Mass digitization and social exclusion have boosted the development of the eCommerce industry, and consumers are increasingly looking to shop online.
Studies show that the number of transactions via mobile gadgets is constantly increasing. According to Oberlo,
Augmented Reality
According to various estimates, augmented reality is one of the main trends in digital marketing for 2021. Indeed, with the advancement of technology, AR capabilities will only grow. The phrase "augmented reality," in general, says it all — the set technologies complement the world of real objects around us with virtual objects created on a computer or mobile device (not to be confused with VR, which creates new virtual environments).
The basic principle of AR is as follows: it identifies specific markers (for example, the user's face) in the real world through the camera, transfers them to the virtual environment, and layer by layer, applies additional features or objects. Thus, the world of AR is created. AR is widespread in medical-related applications, design applications, the film industry, games, advertising applications, and more.
For example, in the
ARKit & RealityKit
A few years ago, Apple introduced its ARKit and RealityKit suite of augmented reality tools.
The main task of
Artificial Intelligence
Today artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the tech market. This term refers to the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. When it comes to AI, we imagine a huge supercomputer the size of a hangar (an image inspired by science fiction films). But in fact, AI is widely used in our mobile applications: various chatbots, photo and video editors, voice assistants, content generation, and much more.
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is arguably the most promising and challenging area of AI. It's a whole science of getting AI to learn and act like a human and making it constantly improve its learning and abilities based on the real-world data we provide it.
Core ML
ShazamKit
A few years ago, Apple bought the
Siri & SiriKit
Speed and Fast Access
All users love speed. It is often essential for us to get quick access to certain functionality, so the popularity of widgets and App Clips is recently gaining momentum.
Widgets
Widgets show up-to-date information at a glance without launching the main mobile app. The primary purpose of the widget is to show the user a small amount of relevant data at a given time.
App Clips
Data Security and Privacy
Security remains one of the main requirements for a mobile application. Most of us are faced with the situation where you browse for something online, and over the next few weeks, you see ads for the same thing. Unfortunately, no one is surprised by this apparent leakage of personal information.
Over the past few years, Apple has been trying to turn its operating system into an impregnable bastion, which, of course, leads to tightening the screws for us, the developers.
Requirements for access to the personal data of the user are becoming more stringent. There are more and more
In Conclusion
Times are changing rapidly. Mobile applications are gaining popularity every day and are firmly embedded in our daily lives. The trends of mobile applications described above are exactly what our future will look like, which means that it is simply necessary to follow them.