New trends in mobile for 2019
We’ve all seen the progress mobile world has done in a VERY short time. When I think about the time before iPhone, which I remind you was released in June 2007, I don’t remember people staring at their phones at all times in transport, cafes, churches. I think about Yahoo! searching engine and about the popularity of Nokia, and of course Internet Explorer 6 and 7 were on the top on the imaginary browser Olymp.
The development of mobile world, and especially the era after iPhone apparition, had allowed unimaginary things to happen: new technology and businesses arising from first published apps, browsers were changing and adapting much faster, social connections at our fingertips, media world became more and more accessible because of the better quality of cameras and last but not least the volume of content created every day is phenomenal.
Just think about it: every day we create about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, which is roughly 250 million human brains (counted in neurons) and of course it will only grow with IoT, Augmented Reality, and new social networks popping out of nowhere.
So what does the picture look like for 2019 for the developer creating mobile experiences? What is worth learning ?
Ionic 4
I think this version of Ionic is really intriguing and fascinating and with advances of modern browsers we all can expect it to be great.
App-to-date Youtube presentation — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_4Ak1CQ8us
There are many interesting things there, but the most important for me is the fact that Ionic became framework-agnostic, meaning less dependant of Angular, and also meaning that you could create an Ionic application in Vue.js for example. And also this means that Ionic is not strongly tied now with an Angular version, so when a new Angular version will come up, you won’t need to wait for an update from Ionic team.
Android Development with Kotlin
More and more new applications in Android are developed in Kotlin, and this is confirmed by different statistics. I took the results of a survey run by Pusher at https://pusher.com/state-of-kotlin and also the data from google trends.
Google Trends for “Kotlin”
After Google I/O 2017 the language popularity is continually growing, and now is especially popular in the ranks of students and young developers. There are 2 strong reasons to add: Google and JetBrains support. While a lot seem to speculate why would Google change gears and choose Kotlin over Java, the important thing is that now everything is in place to make this language a hit: great developer tools (JetBrains), ecosystem and showcasing the language (Google), lots of tutorials and video courses (Udemy, Pluralsight, YouTube), you can use it to create a mobile app (Android). That is why if you wanted to learn a new language in 2019 Kotlin should be the way to go.
Pusher survey results — https://pusher.com/state-of-kotlin
Progressive Web Apps — PWAs
Although mobile and native is evolving, a lot of our clients will doubt to pour a lot of money into a new mobile project in 2019, that many financial gurus predicted to be the year of crisis.
Now I think those clients already have a site for their business, and that my friend is your chance to sell the promise of the progressive web app.
“ You need to define a manifest for your site, may be a service worker, an offline capability, location detection, and why not implement some push notifications ? Wait did I told you about the fact that you can wrap your site and publish to AppStore, Google Play and Windows Store ? So why would you need a native app for your small e-commerce site ?” — in other words, you can use 90% of the same codebase for all of the platforms putting to work your usual web developer skills.
“But I’ve heard about PWAs a long time before 2019, why would it suddenly become a trend ?”. In short, fundamental functionalities were not supported by majority of mobile browsers before 2018. For instance in 2019, service workers became officially supported on Chrome for Android which represented over 33% of total users. As you kind of imagine creating PWAs without basic support for Android was kind of useless.
Service Workers Support — https://caniuse.com/#feat=serviceworkers
I can surely imagine PWAs taking off, covering with a single code base various form factors, platforms and advancing such notions as accessibility, performance improvement using advanced caching, and web workers.
Most used PWAs features as of early 2018 — http://bit.ly/state-of-pwas
All in all, this will advance general web world standards, and give us all a way to create mobile apps without writing tons of new code for each platform. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn it in 2019 !
Flutter
Last but not least in our trends list for 2019 is Flutter, a technology created by Google promising us beautiful designs, near-to-native performance as well as creating apps for both iOS and Android from a single code base. It’s first version was released in December 2018.
Remember your designer build incredible set of screens with animations and transitions, but your developers told you it’s not actually possible and you need to make a trade-off, because either it will hurt your budget or performance or both. Well Flutter is designed to fix that, and not only that. Just check this demos — don’t know about you, but they’ve definitely impressed me:
Flutter uses Dart programming language under the hood, so if you wanted to learn that, you have a chance to combine this new tool for both native use as well as web: Dart compiles to ARM and x86 code, so that Dart mobile apps can run natively on iOS, Android, and beyond. For web apps, Dart is transpiled to JavaScript. By the way Google builts a lot of its tools in Dart: for example, the next generation of Google AdWords is built in Dart.
I will create some simple apps in Flutter just for fun this year, and will try to check how much the promise on the new design and fast development cycle is actually true. So follow our publication if you want more examples of that.
These were my thoughts on the year to come and its trends for mobile development world. Had I missed something ? I hope not, in any case I wish you all a great 2019 2️⃣0️⃣1️⃣9️⃣ , have fun ? and learn something useful.
Please leave comments and let me know if you liked this article and if there is any other subject that you’d like me to cover in 2019.
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