You don’t need to be a magician to realize that mobile applications, which are already popular, will become even more popular with further improvement of mobile devices. Vidmate So the question is not whether there is a place for mobile applications in the future but what type of mobile applications will be most required and, consequently, what segment of this market will be most profitable for developers.
A currently underdeveloped but a very prospective direction for mobile applications to go is advertising. Mobile devices tend to get larger screens with each successive generation, and such screens allow a bit of place for an add to appear.
I bet it is the near future when a wide range of « free » advertiser sponsored applications will appear. Another reason for such a prediction is an increasing interest Google, an advertising monster, has in mobile sector.
Another direction in which mobile applications are likely to develop is cloud computing. Cloud computing uses the internet to store and process resources and data, and unlike data stored on individual devices, internet based information and resources can be easily shared among multiple users.
As the majority of mobile devices have constant or almost constant access to the internet, popularity of cloud based services on mobile devices is projected to increase drastically.
Cloud based services are most popular among businesses that have remote employees and need an effective means to share corporate information with all those employees to make their collaboration efficient.
But probably the most prospective segment for mobile applications is banking services. The reason there are close to none such applications now is not that they are not needed but that there are certain problems that make development of such applications much harder. First of all, it is hard to develop a universal mobile banking application that can be used by all users of mobile devices because of mobile platform fragmentation.
Since most banks or financial institutions would like to have a single app for all their users, regardless of the mobile devices they use, this problem is still to be solved.
The other problem that somewhat slows down mobile banking has to do with data security. Because proper authentication of mobile devices and encryption of stored and transmitted data remain unresolved issues, mobile banking is currently underdeveloped, but is still one of the most prospective directions for mobile application development. This segment of mobile application development market is guaranteed to prosper, once these issues are resolved.
Of course, it is hard to predict which of the numerous types and kinds of mobile applications will be most popular and developing in the future, in fact it may be true that those applications are not even thought of at this time, but advertising, banking, and cloud based services are sure to be among the leaders of the future mobile application market.