The field of technology has two facets: the cutting-edge side that attracts innovative people, and the state of flux that holds people at arm’s length. All new technologies will shift the demographics of technology to some extent, regardless of whether the innovation comes from users or the clients.
For programmers, this leaves us wondering where to focus energy for the next project. More specifically, which trend is likely to become priority?
At this point, it looks like that trend is mobile app development. Here’s why:
Mobile commerce
The rate of mobile commerce has risen dramatically in recent years. Roughly 31% of all sales occur via mobile shopping. Additionally, mobile conversion has increased to 30%.
Two contributors to this rise is the innovations of digital wallets and one-page checkouts (i.e., Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, etc.). These developments alone have increased the conversion rate of mobile commerce everywhere. Moreover, they have been so successful because they’ve circumvented the frustration consumers experience with traditional purchasing methods.
It would be foolish to expect mobile commerce to decrease in demand any time soon as the technology is only improving.
App economy
It shouldn’t come as a shock that mobile commerce trends also have the power to affect client and business demands. This impact is likely to start as a demand for businesses to release their own apps. This demand should be thoroughly considered.
Luckily, most programmers already possess the majority of the skills they need to keep up with consumer demands. For example, Java is the highest ranked programming language and it’s popular for mobile app development. However, it’s worth knowing other programming languages. Google is constantly making itself compatible with additional languages.
In many ways, the modern programmer should already have much of the skills needed to adapt to the growing app industry. Java is consistently ranked the most popular for a reason, but it’s worth looking into other language trends.