Cross Platform Mobile App Development Insights Technology and Trends of 2022

Is your organization leveraging the latest available mobile app technology?

Cross Platform Mobile App Development Insights, Technology and Trends of 2022

Is your organization leveraging the latest available mobile app technology?

The open-source movement is booming. Big tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google are pouring enormous efforts into the evolution of code and frameworks. Even Microsoft, which was previously a fierce opponent of open source has now fully embraced the industry standards and has even acquired the defacto code-sharing platform Github¹.

This means there are plenty of opportunities for any organization to leverage the technology that is readily available for anyone to use. As an agency, we have enabled many different industries to implement different (open source) technologies that provide value to their customers. In this overview, we combine the insights we’ve collected from our various projects: both client and government projects, recent news trends, and a little bit of personal speculation on where things are going.

Insights and Trends in 2022

Phones are still black slabs of glass with an antenna

For the mobile device industry, it is clear that the biggest innovations in the hardware itself have slowed down. Screens get bigger, and cameras get added and hidden in a pinhole or behind the screen, but most innovation is taking place in the on-device software and server technology. Instead of focusing on the hardware, Google is using both on-device AI and cloud AI to improve existing customer flows, such as adding depth of field to pictures and assisting the user in curating their content

Maturation of governing expertise and use of tools to control app lifecycle

On the organization side, we see a further maturation of in-house technical and technology governing expertise. Mobile development is still a more specific expertise than web or server technology, but hybrid technology such as react native has really helped onboard more non-mobile developers into the mobile development realm. In addition, mobile build and packaging platforms such as bitrise decrease the threshold for former non-mobile development teams to also get control over the continuous delivery process of shipping apps to the multitude of app stores.

Shifting from Native, Hybrid, Cross-Platform and Progressive Web Apps

Since the arrival of React Native as a cross-platform technology, the use of older web-based technology such as Cordova has almost completely vanished. Instead, we experience an increased interest in (progressive) web apps, with most government parties stepping away from the google and apple app stores completely and offering their services through web browsers.

The increased demands for accessibility² and independence seem to weigh heavier than the optimized high-end user experience that a cross-platform mobile app can deliver, even though Apple still doesn’t allow developers to send push notifications to Progressive Web Apps³. As long as Apple doesn’t allow sending push notifications to Progressive Web Apps there is still a very strong case for cross-platform mobile applications.

Metaverse, NFT’s and VR

Even though the first commercial VR Headsets were released back in 2016 the realm of Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality has been in a very early stage of maturity and has not found widespread adoption. In 2021, the world of NFTs suddenly grew to a staggering $40bn market⁴ with a widespread adoption by mostly 18 and 24-year-olds ⁵.

Combined with the refocus of Meta (formerly Facebook) and major brands such as Asics, McDonalds and Ubisoft to the virtual reality ownership world of the “Metaverse” this is a combination that is proving to create a lot of traction for both blockchain technologies and VR as marketing, branding and personalisation instruments.

Payments, Bitcoin and Lightning network

In addition to developments around NFT’s in the blockchain space, 2021 and 2022 have shown further adoption of the bitcoin lightning network that provides open source, decentralized peer-to-peer payments. Ex-twitter CEO Jack Dorsey turned his full attention⁶ to the development of the ecosystem that allows wide integration of this payment network in any mobile app or web application that wants payments without paying a payment provider.

Technology Radar: Languages, Frameworks, Techniques & Platforms

To keep track of the wide range of new upcoming technology and create a priority of technologies that we are researching we have adopted the “technology radar” documentation methodology⁷. The technology radar offers a separation of technologies into four quadrants: languages and frameworks, techniques and tools & platforms. Within each of the quadrants we list technologies and label these

• Assess: technologies we are interested in and take into consideration for the next phase of “trial”
• Trial: technologies we are actively experimenting with
• Adopt: technologies we’ve adopted and are part of our business as usual
• Hold: technologies that we’ve stopped using or technologies that didn’t pass the trial phase

Lastly, we are committed to updating the radar continuously with publication each year and labeling each change that has occurred since the last publication.

Languages and frameworks

Remarks:

• React Native: React Native is still the most accessible and widely adopted cross-platform technology. The competitor Flutter is definitely coming up and has a lot of community interest, but a switch from React Native’s Javascript/TypeScript to Flutter’s Dart proves to be a bigger barrier for our, and our clients, Javascript proficient teams.
• Electron: Electron has been off the radar for a while but is now back due to the better porting experience to windows targets since we recently experienced issues with the React Native for Windows build target.
• Svelte Native: We wanted to include an honorable mention for Svelte, since svelte itself is picking up steam as a development favorite due to its performance, smaller size, and ease of learning⁸ over React. Svelte Native is the cross-platform version of Svelte, re-using most of its development paradigms.
• ViroReact: To prepare for the upcoming popularity of Virtual Reality and Metaverse we are experimenting with ViroReact as a virtual reality framework on top of React. This allows us to keep using all of our best practices in web application development and make use of 3D environments natively accessible through mobile VR and AR platforms.
• LightningDevKit: An SDK recently released by Spiral to enable any web application to use free bitcoin lightning payments between users and the platform.

Techniques

Remarks

• Co-development sprints: Our co-development sprints are our go-to method to spin up complete teams and allow client teams to onboard their own team members in a facilitated process. A co-development sprint keeps shipping features to customers whilst also building a self-sufficient team at the client.
• Device lab testing: Device testing has gotten a new meaning since we are also communicating with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In addition to testing mobile apps on multiple devices running multiple platforms we now include integration tests with real IoT hardware in our device labs.
• Customer Experience Research: In addition to incorporating user feedback during design sprints, we are creating continuous collaboration with users through the creation of user panels, fueling both usability testing, accessibility testing, prototype validation, and high-level customer insights that feed back into the product development strategy.

Tools

Remarks

• Matamo / Objectiv: Big changes are happening in the analytics space: Google Analytics might get banned⁹ due to privacy concerns and organisations are looking to secure their data in-house allowing them to apply machine learning. This creates opportunities for open-source, sustainable alternatives such as Matamo as a drop-in replacement for Google Analytics and Objectiv as focussing on deep in-app customer behavior tracking with smooth interfaces for data scientists to apply machine learning and classification models to the collected data.
• Appium: In addition to unit testing with Jest we are experimenting with the use of Appium to create black box end-to-end tests.

Platforms

Remarks

• Phrase: In multi-language app projects with a continuous lifecycle it is important to streamline the flow of translations to avoid stalling the delivery process. Phrase is a SaaS platform we use for maintaining translations and efficiently supplying and receiving translation work from specialized translation teams.
• Bitrise: As mentioned before, Bitrise is an essential platform for continuously building, testing, and deploying apps to the different app stores. It abstracts away tedious appstore-specific requirements in the build process and helps teams prepare the artifacts for both testing and production environments.

Thank you for your interest. This document has given an overview of our collective insights from years of experience with clients and has given a peek into the toolbox we use to implement the right technology for the right project. If you would like to know more about a specific technology, our teams, or more details about our services please feel free to reach out through the contact details listed below.

Notes

Footnotes

1. Why you need an open source strategy https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/open-source-software-strategy-benefits ↩

2. https://www.verzekeraars.nl/academy/opleidingen-trainingen/trainingen-digitale-toegankelijkheid ↩

3. https://firt.dev/ios-15.4b ↩

4. https://www.ft.com/content/e95f5ac2-0476-41f4-abd4-8a99faa7737d ↩

5. https://www.colormatics.com/article/nft-audience-insights-whos-buying-nfts-and-why ↩

6. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-spiral-jack-dorseys-rebranded-bitcoin-company-is-accelerating-adoption ↩

7. https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/radar-retrospective-10-years-thoughtworks-technology-radar ↩

8. https://massivepixel.io/blog/svelte-vs-react/ ↩

9. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-10/google-analytics-risks-french-ban-over-u-s-data-spying-fears ↩