Are You Ready for the Next Evolution of Mobile Development in 2015?

Mobile development has come a long way since Nokia first started putting Snake and Pong on their earliest phones several decades ago.

As mobile technology has become faster, cheaper and popular, the speed at which new mobile tech experiences are changing is astounding, and developers are having a tough time catching up.

Moving into the next year, mobile developers will have to adapt to the way consumers are spending their time. Research firm Forrester says that developers who are still focusing on mastering application development aren’t on trend with the market.

According to the analyst firm, there’s a shift away from individual apps in mobile development. Instead, the market needs “more contextually relevant micro-moments, delivered across families of devices, that are personalized to anticipate unique customer needs,” ReadWrite reports.

Standalone Apps are Out, Micro-Moments are In

In the new evolution of mobile development, it’s all about flexibility.

API designs need to be able to adapt to the behavior of the consumer in a fluid motion, depending on the consumer’s context.

Mobile development is headed into an even more complicated arena, which requires cohesive development not only across devices but also with the rhythm of human behavior.

“In a sense, the golden age of the self-contained app is over, but developers still need to adjust,” Forrester analyst Jeffery Hammond said in a blog post.

In the future, no one’s going to take the time to open up an app and work in it. Instead, apps will notify people at appropriate, non-invasive times and include widgets that create a more natural, holistic experience versus a simple standalone app.

ReadWrite reports the following eight key predictions, extracted from the research agency, which is available here for download at a price:

1. Standalone apps will lose their luster
2. Hardware-driven innovation will enable new opportunities
3. Mobile competition will shift to accessories and ecosystems
4. Composition will dominate front-end mobile experiences
5. The merger of physical and digital worlds accelerates
6. Mobile context becomes high-def
7. Service virtualization and API design tools will appear in every development toolbox
8. Low-code platforms will move into the aggregation tier, but struggle to go mainstream

What Are ‘Micro Moments?’

The bar for a truly long-lasting and successful app is much higher than base app functionality, according to Michael Facemire, a former enterprise mobile developer and an analyst behind the research paper. It’s time to think outside of the app container.

Enter: Micro Moments.

They are “brief interactions where developers can get customers' attention -- and anticipate their needs,” Hammond says.

Micro moments are an immersive experience that knows no barriers between devices or even apps.

“Mobile developers used to be constrained to their own secure, sand-boxed containers with minimal access to sensors on the device and local storage, but separated from other custom apps,” Hammond says in the same blog post.

And as the revolution of the ‘Internet of Things’ continues to accelerate, mobile applications will need to adapt to hardware as well.

Plus, the big players, Apple and Google, have recently opened up access so that mobile app developers can partner up and build on their platforms.

“These provide APIs so that developers can inject contextually relevant information into platform mobile services or aggregation apps like HomeKit and HealthKit,” according to the report.

Perhaps this shifts means there’s a bigger demand for a genuine understanding of human behavioral sciences. Studying analytics on how people consume products--especially forthcoming smart products---is more important in 2015 than ever before.