Mobile products seem to have become an integral part of our daily reality and everything indicates it will stay this way. From sheer entertainment to streamlining processes, increasing efficiency in various segments of both people’s lives and many industries – mobile apps are here to stay and provide value to customers. All of this keeps mobile apps in constant high demand and also makes the market worth quite a lot.
The prediction for the overall mobile app market is for continuous growth. The market is expected to reach a staggering $935 billion in revenue in 2023. Moreover, consumer spending on the App Store could reach nearly $200 billion by 2025.
Being a part of the mobile apps industry, it’s crucial to keep up with the latest trends in mobile app development. Each year we try to gather the most insightful industry intel and predict which of the emerging (and most well-adapted) trends in mobile apps will dominate the market in the upcoming year. Together with the Tooploox mobile development team, we chose seven 2023 trends in mobile app development that should not be overlooked in the near future.
KMM
Kotlin multiplatform mobile (KMM) is a framework for building cross-platform applications using the Kotlin programming language. It allows developers to share code across different platforms, including Android, iOS, and the web and provides a set of standard libraries for accessing platform-specific functionality. With Kotlin multiplatform mobile, developers can reuse their code and avoid having to write separate implementations for each platform, saving time and effort.
Why is it trending?
Kotlin multiplatform mobile is trending because it offers an efficient and cost-effective way to build cross-platform applications. By allowing developers to share code across multiple platforms, Kotlin multiplatform mobile reduces the amount of time and effort required to develop and maintain separate codebases for each platform. Additionally, the use of the Kotlin programming language, which is concise, expressive, and supports null safety and functional programming, makes it easier and more enjoyable for developers to write cross-platform code. These benefits have led to increasing adoption of Kotlin multiplatform mobile among developers, making it a trending topic in the field of mobile app development.
Jetpack Compose for Android
Jetpack Compose is an Android UI toolkit for building a modern native User Interface (UI). It is built upon the Kotlin language, provides powerful tools for creating and managing UI elements, and provides a more efficient and declarative way to construct UIs.
Why is it trending?
Compose also helps to simplify the development process, allowing developers to write less code and focus more on design elements. Compose is also integrated with existing Android APIs, such as ViewModels, making it easier to maintain and test.
Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon
Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion machine learning model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt.
Why is it trending?
Developers are discovering many new uses for Stable Diffusion which may be able to leverage this technology effectively for developing mobile apps that will be widely used by creatives. Image editing, in-painting, out-painting, style transfer, and color palette generation – the growing number of applications of Stable Diffusion makes it one of the top mobile app development trends of recent times.
Lock screen widgets in iOS 16
Apple’s iOS 16 has brought long-awaited software updates that support the iPhone’s new customizable lock screen. With the new iPhone lock screen, users can tweak the background, change colors and fonts and add new widgets that stay on their screen when the iPhone is locked.
This software update also allows developers to build widgets that are rendered on the lock screen. When iOS 16 was released, many third-party apps were updated to support lock screen widgets as well.
Why is it trending?
Customizable widgets seem to be bringing greater productivity and functionality to users’ iPhone lock screens. These little glimpses into an app’s features, such as weather, upcoming calendar event, or the current status of fitness goals, are now accessible from a quick glance at the locked screen without forcing users to launch an app to retrieve a single piece of information.
The possibility of further personalization of fonts, icons, background tweaking, and decorations is definitely a strong trend in mobile app development right now. While customizing their iPhone lock screens, users can choose widgets from a wider variety of apps than ever, and that number only promises to grow.
Live Activities in iOS 16
Live Activities is a new iPhone feature that helps users stay on top of things that are happening in real-time, such as sports games, workouts, ride-shares, or food delivery orders, all from the Lock Screen. For example, while waiting for a delivery from Uber Eats, the user can put away the locked phone and, thanks to Live Activities, will be able to check the progress of the order without the necessity of unlocking the mobile device and entering the app. It will be available right from a lock screen or Dynamic Island itself.
Why is it trending?
The Live Activities feature is going to be the perfect solution for all mobile apps that share a real-life status: food delivery apps, workout tracking apps, and transportation apps are clear cases, but this may also offer new possibilities for entertainment apps, for example, sports scores or real-time gambling. The feature seems to be both time and effort-saving. Moreover, Apple is supposed to share the API for Live Activities which will probably make it one of the strong 2023 trends in mobile app development.
Apple AR Headset
Will 2023 finally be the year when Apple enters the Metaverse world with its long-awaited AR headset? Apple’s aspirations in AR have been transparent and well signaled for years with more and more advanced AR tools inside iPhones and iPads. It has been debated when the true hardware might be expected – and recent news indicates that its arrival might be expected in the second half of 2023.
Why is it trending?
Apple’s ambitions regarding AR seem to be boisterous. At the beginning of 2021, company rumors said that “Apple’s goal is to replace the iPhone with AR in ten years.” The launch of Apple’s first AR headset, a device that will be able to operate independently from a mac or an iPhone, is supposed to kickstart this transition and be a new chapter in wearable technology. The process of replacing the iPhone, although it seems hard to imagine right now, will also be aligned with a wide range of applications that the new AR headset is going to support. Many thought that 2022 was supposed to be the year of AR, VR, and metaverse but a lot of global economic events caused many delays and reality checks (the crypto collapse, and waves of layoffs in the tech industry). This, combined with Apple’s plans, makes AR one of the postponed trends in mobile app development.
Prototyping SwiftUI apps with ChatGPT
What would an article about trends in mobile app development be without a mention of ChatGPT in 2023? We already know that ChatGTP is capable of generating code for simple apps. Can this be the future of iOS app prototyping? It can for sure provide at least substantial support for aspiring app developers and be a useful tool for fixing bugs or in-code implementation.
Why is it trending?
OpenAI tools are already empowering marketers, content creators, and bloggers. It is expected that in the near future, phenomena like ChatGPT will become an integral part of developers’ workflow as well, especially those (quoting ChatGPT itself) “looking to quickly prototype ideas or generate code for complex user interfaces.” There are no questions about why conversational machine learning models are one of the strongest trends in mobile app development right now.
Wrapping Up
To make your mobile app a success, outrun the technologically adaptable competition, and thrive in the mobile environment, apps should stay relevant and deliver an elevated experience as compared to websites. The first step to do that is to stay updated with the latest mobile app industry trends. If you intend to create a successful mobile app, it’s wise to follow these trends and cooperate with a reliable partner with a cutting-edge technological approach who delivers delightful mobile experiences.
If you have a hunch that one of the app trends in 2023 might benefit your business or represent a good opportunity to expand your growth, don’t hesitate to contact us and have a chat about the possibilities!