Apple’s iPhones are one of the most popular smartphones around the world. People are so fond of Apple’s products that they stand in queues to buy their favorite iPhone whenever it is released. Good thing about Apple is that it updates its core iOS operating system version every year and after these changes the app developers too update their designing and development process as required. The iPhone users like to use the iPhone apps on their iPhones and iPads. As iPhones and iOS are updated each year hence the next question comes to mind is which are the most popular iOS app development trends which the developers should follow in 2019.
There is no doubt that more businesses are looking to hire iPhone app developer while Apple has played an important role in innovating and providing customers latest cutting edge mobile devices and electronic gadgets. Apple keeps on innovating and bringing better hardware configurations each year. In latest update, Apple has introduced new devices having revolutionary features like amazing graphics, processing, security and AI features. The latest release of iOS 12 also brought before us interesting features, making iOS top platform in the industry. iOS 12 comes with best of Apple features like enhanced security, face recognition and cloud integration to make iOS even more competitive. If you use latest iOS app development trends, then you can make your iOS device even more amazing.
Let’s now discuss about the latest trends that will define the iPhone app development in 2019.
Swift 5.0
Swift is a programming language developed by Apple itself to specially build amazing iOS apps on iOS and Linux platforms. Swift can also be pre-compiled for macOS and tvOS. Swift 4 is the latest and most advanced version of Swift. Swift is easy to learn and highly scalable programming language and offers high level of security. Now iOS app developers are waiting for the Swift 5 release which is expected to be released anytime soon in 2019. This new version of Swift 5.0 will bring ABI (Application Binary Interfaces) stability. This ABI stability will help the iOS app developers to embed the Swift libraries with the runtime. This embedding can happen within the operating system which is compatible with iOS apps developed using Swift 5.0. The ABI stability in Swift 5.0 will also drastically reduce the app size.
Hence Swift 5.0 will create a trend among iPhone app developers and any iOS App Creator should choose Swift for all of their iPhone app development projects in 2019. Good thing about Swift is that it leads to much easier and faster iOS app development and such iOS apps don’t consume much of the memory of the iPhone devices.
Augmented Reality
Apple has regularly added a number of features from time to time into its iOS platform. Recently updated iOS 12 was launched with great new features. One of such most important update is Augmented Reality Apps. With the iOS 11, AR comes to the hands of iPhone app developers. Now so many iPhone developers use the power of Apple’s ARKit framework to make the iOS apps much smarter. For example: – IKEA place allows the customers to imagine how their products would look into their home virtually without bringing the products at home by using AR. With the help of AR technology, American Airlines brings real-time information about what is where near you at the airport terminals. With the advancements in Apple’s ARKit Framework what Apple is trying to do is – “Augmented Reality Interface for Interacting with Displayed Maps”. This means Apple wants to use advanced ARKit in the Apple Maps to make people navigate to new places using their iPhone devices. Hence it is the best time to use ARKit framework in your new iPhone app development project. AR feature will also become more popular in on-demand apps like UberEats – a food delivery app.
Improved Security Features with Apple ATS TLS 1.2 :
Apple never compromises on the security aspect and we have been seeing this for many years now. Studies say there are more malware attacks on Android smartphones compares to iOS ones. This is due to Apple’s efforts for its tight control over what kind of apps are approved and launched on the App Store. The security of the iOS apps, the data involved and the iPhones have become very important in recent years. Apple’s security team is looking to bring the App Transport Security (ATS) compliance, TLS 1.2 which as per Apple will bring high level of security in the modern web. TLS is actually Transport Layer Security and it provides safer and authenticated confidential communication. For the last 2 decades, TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 were used across all Apple platforms but there were few bugs in these. From March 2020, TLS 1.2 will be the standard ATS compliance for all Apple platforms and the earlier versions will not be supported anymore by Apple devices. Hence we can say that 2019 and years to come will bring more security to the iOS applications and iOS developers have to use such kind of technologies in iPhone app development.
Artificial Intelligence & Contextual Learning for Siri and use of Siri Shortcuts :
Siri is the personal assistant developed by Apple. Due to its many features and benefits it has become very popular around the world. It provides a significant boost to Artificial Intelligence and contextual learning and can understand what people are talking and asking and what they are looking for in a search. People now call Siri as their best friends and their boredom killer as it interacts smartly. According to reports, out of 800 questions asked to Siri, 74.6% were answered correctly during the tests. Actually Siri got more success when compared to Amazon Alexa with 72.5% and Microsoft Cortana with 63.4%. This means Siri has become a much smarter digital voice assistant which uses AI. With the launch of iOS 12, Siri has started to provide integration with the third party iOS apps with the name, shortcuts. Hence now iOS app developers can build the iPhone apps that trigger certain functions using Siri now more easily and quickly. It will give more business owners better business ideas to become successful in the app market and the app developers would be able to build their apps using the Siri Shortcut. Apple has now started taking this function more seriously as it was not present in earlier versions. Hence AI based Siri shortcuts will be seen more and more trending in year 2019 and the years to come.
Apple Pay Will Be More User Friendly and Integrated with iOS Apps:
Apple pay is a mobile payment and digital wallet service which allows iOS users to make payments using various iOS platforms like iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or even Mac. Apple pay is now becoming more and more popular each day as now more people look to buy products of services online using Apple Pay. Reports say that since 2015-2016, already there has been more than 500% increase in transactions using Apple Pay. For example, you can use Apple Pay to book your events, air tickets, on-demand service and more and it allows users to send or receive money in their messages in a highly secured manner. With inbuilt security, Apple Pay supports the iPhone developers to develop applications which can integrate with Apple Pay to provide easy and highly secure cashless online transactions. Apple pay doesn’t need to share or store any debit or credit card information hence managing app is easy. Recently Apple said that more than one billion Apple Pay transactions took place in Q3 of 2018 in the company’s earning call. That’s awesome. A study says that Apple Pay transactions is expected to witness 200% growth by 2019. This clearly suggests that Apple products are soon going to see more integration of Apple Pay making the online transactions more secured and fast. Hence to integrate a payment gateway in an iOS app, iOS app developers would look to integrate Apple Pay to encourage more secured transactions in future.
Core ML 2 – The Machine Learning Framework :
Core Machine Learning or CoreML is a new foundational framework from Apple which is used across various Apple products including Siri, camera and QuickType and more. It offers very fast performance and allows developers to take benefits of machine learning models to develop smart apps by writing very less code. In 2018, Core ML came with the computerized vision technologies which can detect, faces, natural language processing and AI game development. Now the newer version, Core ML 2 is expected to play a very important role in developing Apple’s future hardware ready products. Reports say that Apple’s Core ML is about 30% faster with the help of new batch prediction technology. This new Core ML 2 toolkit allows the iPhone app developers to use quantization in reducing about 75% of the trained machine learning models’ size. Apple is also bringing some hardware changes too to provide the ML capability in their upcoming devices like the Apple Neural Engine chip. Using this chip, even the third-party app developers would be able to execute their own AI within their devices. This will increase the use of Core ML 2 by iOS app developers to develop high-performing, responsive, feature rich and interactive iOS apps. Core ML2offers high level of communication and robust library and it will redefine the gaming app development. Developers looking to develop gaming apps will be able to build AI-enabled apps with advanced features like face detection or voice recognition. Games are right now the most popular category by numbers in the Apple App store as they account for about 25% of the apps. Hence, Core ML2 will be one of the most popular trend in iPhone app development in 2019.
IoT app Integration:
Although IoT industry is taking some time but it is surely going towards a big boom in near future. IoT means Internet of Things and it involves the high speed data transfers and communication between electronic, mobile and computing devices through internet network. Due to the huge demands for IoT apps, number of IoT developers is also increasing at very fast rate and in 2019 and in years to come it is going to go up even more. As we know the technology is constantly evolving thus the use of IoT devices in iOS app development will evolve too. This kind of integration requires the use of sophisticated mobile platform and a strong back-end infrastructure which can communicate and share data between devices at very high speed and in most secured manner. Also IoT leads to the efficient use of data analytics to promote more growth. Hence it looks like IoT app integration will pick up in 2019 and more and more iPhone apps will be starting to use IoT devices into their iOS apps to provide much advanced and better services to the iPhone users across the world.
Conclusion
As we have just discussed, Apple’s current focus in on completely utilizing technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), Augmented Reality (AR) and the more use of their Swift 5.0 programming language. With this Apple teams’ goals are clear which includes – Creating unique and best customer experiences, offering best in class features and functionalities and leading the technology space in future too. To achieve this, Apple is no doubt going to advance and do more research in all of its platforms and hardware including iOS. Hence, all of the above iPhone app development trends are going to make phenomenal iOS apps which will be capable to bring more business to the app owners and more success for the app developers. Hence iOS developers should take note of these trends in iOS app development and should try to build amazing and more advanced iOS apps based on these trends and keep winning the hearts of their highly valued and tech savvy customers.
