Top 5 Enterprise Mobility Trends for 2018 from Appdome

2017 has been an amazing year for exploring the mobile SDK integration landscape. In talking to customers, partners and analysts, I’ve learned a lot. Several of you have been asking for my insight and opinion for the 2018 Enterprise Mobility Trends. In no particular order, here is what I think.

1. Organizational Agility and DevOps
   Technology is evolving faster than companies can hire, train and promote engineers to meet their mobile demands. As a result, enterprises will continue to transform and embrace DevOps strategies, to produce better and more efficient outcomes. This includes adopting new technologies, organizational structures, and workflows that enable the enterprise citizenry to develop, deploy and complete projects otherwise delegated to engineering.
2. Democratized Micro-Services for Mobile
   Enterprises and app publishers will increasingly demand more options to enable their own micro-services of choice inside the mobile apps they build and the 3^rd-party mobile apps they use. Static integrations will eventually be replaced by dynamic, on-demand service choice, allowing for richer and more diverse mobile service implementations for all use cases. This will ease the burden on developers, allowing mobile service choice to be democratized outside of engineering organizations and seeded across new stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem.
3. No-Code and Low-Code are the New Thing in Mobile
   Enterprises are still beginning their journey toward mobile app development. These organizations are under intense pressure to create and deliver mobile solutions to internal and external users. As a result, these organizations are seeking out newer “low code” and “no code” platforms to perform all stages of developing and deploying mobile apps. The goal is to produce more apps in shorter timeframes and deliver mobile solutions to users faster.
4. Mobile Security for Everyone
   The functionality and business importance of apps has crossed a threshold. Enterprises and application publishers are now rejecting apps that don’t have the required security. Less and less, developers will choose to implement features over security. And, less and less will enterprises choose app productivity over app security. If an app is built without the required security feature set, organizations will look to add those features post-build. In many cases, this will be done by the enterprise as the customer of the pre-built app.
5. SDKs in the API Economy are on the rise
   The proliferation of high-quality mobile SDKs and APIs has produced the promise of tremendous choice for the modern developer. However, to test or prove any given solution, the developer has to do the work of adding the SDK or API before making a purchase decision. This leads to indecision, high switching costs, and other complications. Efforts to simplify integration work are good. But, technology is needed to automate the implementation of services to apps, eliminate manual coding and allow quick, agile and scalable mobile service integration.

Thanks to the customers, partners and industry analysts who have shared their Enterprise Mobility Trends with me. I hope I have done a good job of representing what I’ve learned from all of you.

To 2018!