It is no wonder that mobile app market is on fire lately. A study of Smart Insights says that over 90 percent of the people who spent time on mobile devices was actually spent on mobile applications. Mobile apps have come a long way over the past decade and now they have begun to influence the growth of the IoT as well.
As a matter of fact, mobile applications have been acting as a connecting bridge between next-gen thinking enterprises which are trying to bring much smarter devices that can improve every aspect of our lives and customers.
As a result, not only could we say that mobile apps have successfully laid the foundation for the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), but also that IoT and mobile applications go hand in hand.
Considering this great shift, mobile application developers found their score making some effective changes to the mobile app development.
But how did mobile apps help IoT rise?
As of now, mobile applications are utilized as end gamers that are used to do or perform a particular task such as streaming music, playing games, messaging apps, etc. But the thing is that the mobile applications can do much more than just being the end gamers such as serving as gateways.
In general, IoT is much simpler in terms of architecture when compared to smartphones and hence they would require an endpoint in order to send data.
Ultimately, these endpoints are allowed to monitor events such as the temperature in the different rooms before they transmit the data to services so that it can be utilized to analyze trends. As a perfect instance of the above-mentioned type of IoT and mobile application integration is a Wi-Fi enabled thermostat.
Now, in this case, the mobile application is the remote which has complete control over the device while thermostat being the IoT endpoint.
Impact of IoT on mobile application development
In a way, IoT has transformed the face of mobile applications, and to accomplish the goal of making everyone’s life simpler, mobile app developers should first go through the pain of building a flexible infrastructure and platform. In fact, building mobile applications is pretty much similar to building a web application using conventional software development.
Nevertheless, there will be one vital differentiating factor which mobile applications can take advantage of creative features which a smartphone could provide. For example, gaming applications could take leverage of iPhone’s accelerometer.
As Internet of Things continues to grow, the concept of smart appliances, smart homes, smart cities, etc. would come more into existence. In such an environment, smartphones function as the main interface via which users will be able to interact with IoT-enabled gadgets. In the current state, smartphones already have efficient sensors and apps which provide excellent info related to users.
Apart from this, smartphones are also capable of tracking the condition if light, the orientation of gadget, and many other things. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc. are some of the variety of functions that enable the devices to interact with the other sensors and devices.
A mobile phone can communicate with fitness equipment and smartwatch to improve the user experience. In the same way, Internet of Things let operate the office system remotely and allow you keep an eye on your office from anywhere.
In short, IoT has developed an immense market demand for the development of applications for them. The same connectivity let the best app developers cooperate with each other easier than ever before.
Industries that are benefiting from IoT app development
When it comes to IoT app development, not just one or two, there are various industries that are truly getting benefited from IoT app development as mobile app developers are trying to make use of IoT solutions in very domain and field.
Healthcare
We can see a hell of a lot of difference in the healthcare industry after it has been subjected to the creative IoT solutions. With the execution of IoT in healthcare applications, people have become more health conscious than before and are keeping a track of their health in much easier ways.
“87 percent of healthcare organizations are planning to adopt IoT technology by the year 2019.” Healthcarenews.com
Read also :Top IoT App Development Tools 2018
The foremost objective of implementing IoT technology solutions in the healthcare system is to make it easier for the users to monitor their health. Right from personal healthcare to facilities in the healthcare buildings, it includes all sorts of elements.
Users can easily track their daily routine such as a number of miles walked, diet plan, etc. and on the other side, healthcare organizations can store this info of the patients in these applications for future references.
Energy
An average American spends nearly 3 hours on their smartphone every day. With IoT technology, app developers are able to generate better customer engagement in their applications.
By utilizing applications which support IoT, users can literally manage their smart appliances at home such as Air conditioner, refrigerator, etc by sitting somewhere far away.
There will be more than 1.5 billion devices managed by utility companies by the year 2020.
Retail
As far as logistics and transportation are concerned, IoT offers better assistance by providing exact location tracking so that the customers can easily track their orders in the application right from the moment of shipping to the successful delivery.
One fine instance of this sort of app of IoT in the retail industry is Amazon Go. It is a tech-based shopping store by Amazon.
Almost 87 percent of retail owners will deploy MPOS (Mobile point-of-sales) devices by the year 2021 allowing them to scan and accept payments through debit or credit cards anywhere in the store — Retail Vision Study
Are you ready for the change?
Mobile applications and Internet of Things will be going on the same track and in case you haven’t given any thoughts on the influence of IoT on mobile application development then let me tell you that you will certainly lag behind. This whole idea of smart devices thrives more on the idea of IoT more evolves where smartphones will be functioning as the main interface to communicate with IoT enabled devices.
Internet of Things could add an excellent value to our lives. Right now, there are various open source platforms that are providing helpful tools to build IoT-friendly applications and this contributes a lot to the growth of IoT environment.
With the consistent development in Internet of Things, mobile applications are stepping toward a better, smart, and well-connected world. It’s time for app developers to develop IoT-based applications where data will be transmitted by objects via sensors and received by the mobile application in real time.
Closing thoughts
For sure, we can say that IoT is a huge breakthrough in the app development field. The growth of IoT-enabled devices will have a great impact on the way we look at them. Currently, data security, computing performance, power consumption, etc. are some of the major areas of concern.
No doubt that IoT will open more opportunities for mobile application developers. Nevertheless, the change and growth are quite challenging and exhilarating at the same time.