Keep Abreast of the Top Mobile App Development Trends in 2021 [Updated]

Dana Kachan
Product Coalition
Published in
5 min readApr 22, 2020

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Mobile App UI Design by Fireart Studio

Mobile app development is one of the fastest-growing and evolving industries today. Regardless of a business domain, type, and company size, your brand will likely face the moment when it needs a mobile app to connect with customers and establish better relationships with your target audience.

To build a successful mobile app that stands out from its competitors in the app store, you need not only have a great app development strategy but also be aware of the latest mobile app development trends and tendencies.

To help you keep abreast of the latest innovations in mobile app development, we have collected this list of the six most prominent trends.

Artificial Intelligence Makes Mobile Apps Smarter

Artificial intelligence has been a central topic of the hottest tech-related discussions during the last few years. Step by step, it starts entering different industries and disrupting them with innovative approaches. Mobile app development is not an exception.

In 2021, artificial intelligence promises to make mobile applications even smarter than before. The integration of AI and mobile apps allows saving a lot of time, effort, and costs for a mobile app development company.

Today, financial, customer service, healthcare industries, and many businesses are actively integrating AI into their native apps.

We’d like to introduce here a shortlist of the possible AI trends we may see in mobile app development soon:

  • AI automated DevOps through AIOps
  • AI-enabled chips
  • Automated machine learning
  • Interoperability among neural networks

Hybrid Mobile App Development

Cross-platform apps have been popular in 2020 and continue gaining traction in 2021 too. Hybrid app development has become a cost-effective option and comparatively straightforward way to build a great mobile app that runs on both, iOS and Android operating systems. 2021 promises an even sharper need and bigger demand for such apps in the market. As a micro-trend, we can also see the continuous rivalry of the two leading hybrid app development frameworks: Flutter and React Native development.

Hybrid apps have a lot of advantages, for instance, they are more cost-effective, they require shorter development time, they have offline support, they run on both iOS and Android platforms, they offer easy integration with third-party apps, and they are a great online marketplace.

Mobile Wallets Become Even More Significant

The boost of e-commerce and online financial services has caused the continuous development of new payment options. However, after the world has seen Apple Pay and Google Wallet, people have started rapidly switching to mobile commerce.

It’s very likely that in 2021, we will become witnesses of more secure mobile wallet development, the further growth of contactless payments, and over 2 billion mobile wallet users worldwide.

The widely spreading internet payment systems require new, faster, and more secure channels for money transactions. It has become the reason for the growing popularity of mobile wallets.

Promotion Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP is a project developed by Google in close collaboration with Twitter. At its core, there is a concept of creating a stripped-down version of HTML that can make the loading of mobile pages much faster. It allows companies to build heavier and visually stunning websites with higher loading speed.

It will help provide smoother user experience, decrease bounce rates, grow conversions, and enhance the overall online business presence and website performance across different devices.

Google has already integrated AMP technology into mobile searches, and it promises to help developers reduce the web page loading time. Recently, Google has also announced that it will create a mobile search box that will allow users to get results only with mobile-friendly websites. That’s why AMP optimization is becoming a requirement for online businesses that want to perform great on Google.

Cloud-Based Mobile Applications

Adaptation to cloud-based technologies has almost become a must for mobile app development. It helps provide a smooth user journey, allows us to store a lot of user data, and make an app perform complex functions. It has plenty of benefits, such as streamlined operations, less equipment cost, a decrease in hosting, enhanced storage capacity of apps, and increased collaboration.

As known, today, most of the heavy apps with a big database use AWS (Amazon Web Service) as their cloud-based storage. It allows us to increase the loading speed, processing power, and enhance app security.

Predictive Analytics for a Better UX

Predictive analytics is based on the idea of forecasting future events by analyzing the data we already have. This approach employes techniques used in machine learning, data mining, artificial intelligence, statistics, and modeling.

The world’s biggest companies have already made AI-driven predictive analytics a part of their customer journey research. The power and potential of predictive analytics are so tremendous that Netflix has even offered $1 000 000 to anybody who will help this giant to optimize its content suggestion engine with the help of predictive analytics algorithms.

Conclusion

Here we’ve introduced the six most important mobile app development trends that are predicted to gain their momentum in 2021. We’re sure that these are just a few of those incredible tech disruptions that await mobile app developers and users this year. Let’s keep abreast of the latest developments and monitor how mobile app innovations will deploy into the next big trends in the nearest months.

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Digital Marketing Strategist. Ex-CMO @ GamesPad & BullPerks. Contributor to Entrepreneur, VentureBeat and UX Magazine.