Mobile technologies are taking over. Over the last 5 years we have seen this market growing fast. The market for mobile apps is still growing. Wether it's Android, iPhone or Windows Phone there a lot of people adding apps to their toolsets and assets.
Over the last 2-3 years we've seen an increased interest in designing mobile apps by business organizations as well. Rather than individual app owners, these businesses started to recognize the opportunity and business value mobility can bring to an organization: that's far from just cool buzz, it is actually adding $ to their revenue or subtracting $ from their monthly expenses.
Mobile apps are nowadays seen as assets.
Here are a few trends we have seen over the last 2 years while writing code or working on proposals.
1. Location based apps
Businesses figured out there is a lot of value in presenting location based data. "Right there" (where the user is located) and "right away" became very powerful concepts in apps for restaurants, retailers, auto mechanics, professional services companies, IT shops, beauty parlors, grocery stores etc.
Services like Google Apps or Bing do help with fairly accurate, national data and solid API to pull from: from there you can get addresses, phone numbers etc. Companies like Yelp offer good data on reviews, # of stars etc. So you as a developer certainly have the means and opportunity to aggregate these data and present them on user's mobile terminals.
An interesting aspect to discuss here is that users are getting more demanding lately in terms of the quality and the quantity of the data they want displayed: I just had a recent requirement where the user asked me to display data like "what is exactly is on the menu", "prices" and "how friendly the staff was"at this particular restaurant. General APIs do not store these kind of data. So there is always an opportunity to build your own database with granular data and feed it from behind the scenes.
2. Social media apps
Social media got much more business focused lately. We wrote full fledged social media platforms for realtors where people won't login to share pictures or casually chat (nonetheless they have those capabilities too): they login to establish business relationships, to refer leads they can't serve and to collaborate on projects. There is a fee to enroll with the system, you have to be a licensed realtor in your State to participate and you have to go through a 1 day training on rules and practices on the business side of the site.
Another type of companies we have seen very active in the mobile social media arena are companies involved in organizing business events: they are basically events organizers. These companies figured out a pretty solid way of monetizing their apps through back side memberships and subscriptions. When you get enrolled with such a company (and there are a few of them here in town) you get all kinds of perks and one of them is access to their mobile apps platform with networking opportunities, events calendars, informations on venues, bios of speakers etc.
As opposed to consumer oriented social media apps, the businesses have stricter requirements in terms of security, privacy, compliance, data accuracy and data availability.
3. Apps that support sales or sales proceses
Last fall we were asked to produce an Excel type of app for sales people to use in their meetings with the management. The requirement came from a Product Manager of a large local organization here in Miami.
The pitfall was that they had sophisticated spreadsheets with multiple workbooks, formulae, pivots and things and they did not like how the standard Office app displayed these spreadsheets on their mobile phones and tablets. Management would ask them very specific questions and it was a struggle for them to drill and find that specific column / workbook to report on that.
They wanted us to design something innovative and easy to use where they would quickly "flip" through pre-structured, clean, one screen display little pages or fast "jump" to a specific page if needed. There was more to the functionality and I won't get into details here.
This is a good example of an app that supports a sales process.
4. Specialized apps for IT groups
IT groups were on the forefront of adopting mobile technologies. By definition IT groups are early adopters of new technologies and they were some of the first ones who requested us to write mobile apps for them.
IT groups generally order apps that helps them in their daily activities such as network monitoring apps, reporting apps, apps that signal services interruptions or malfunctions or apps that support the activities of on call tech support teams. Every now and then a small collaboration or proprietary communication app is requested. Widgets that show on call rotation schedules are in demand as well.
IT people generally have very clear requirements and they are very opinionated on how an app has to work :) Sometimes they are ready to design the app for you!
5. Marketing and leads generations apps
Mobile leads generation is already a big business but I envision it will very soon absolutely boom when more people will figure out about how effective it is. Technically it actually involves standing up a profiles database, writing web services and an Android and an iPhone app to talk to those web services then starting to distribute the apps to make them land on people's phones.
Business wise you need to make an attractive easy to use app and give people reasons to use it. So your business concept is very important.
We had historically designed leads generations apps for the legal services industry, for IT services companies and for the sports and celebrities industries. But I believe there are applications in every single industry out there: if you can catch a sales lead right there where the user is and right then, you can build a big business.
There are also two other growing segments of the market in medical apps, apps for legal services and apps for real estate companies. These are interesting apps because, while they serve a definite need of a specialized profession or group of professionals, they have very strict compliance requirements.
Make it a great day!
Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com
Witty Web Solutions (http://wittywebnow.com) is a Miami Beach based software development company. Our code is lean, small foot print, easy to read, reliable and fast. We have excellent tech support. We save development costs by implementing agile project management techniques.
