6 important app trends & gadgets of 2018

The Internet of Things (IoT) was born between 2008 and 2009 (Cisco IBSG, April 2011), one year after the App Store. As can be seen in the graph below, the interest in making all devices in the home smarter has increased every year since then.

Not only has interest grown, the market is also picking up. It is expected that in 2018 more household appliances will be connected to the internet than smartphones and tablets.

When the market grows, so do the opportunities. At the moment, the principle of a digital twin is emerging. But what is a digital twin? A digital twin of your house is a replica with the same properties but digitally. You can use an app to see exactly whether you have turned off the lamp in the kitchen and whether you have locked the back door. Does it appear that you accidentally left the lamp on? Then you can turn it off remotely.

The combination of artificial intelligence and smart homes has led to voice activated smart homes. These are smart artificial intelligence interfaces that you can talk to to interact with your smart home. For example, you can ask if your smart home can automatically lock the back door if it is after 10 p.m.

Data bundles have grown considerably in recent years. Nowadays hardly anyone is satisfied with a bundle of one gigabyte. The speed has also increased considerably. Why? Because everyone wants to have everything at hand. Waiting a minute for your email to load? Not really! But it doesn't stop there, web pages and apps are also getting faster and faster. Last year Android came with so-called instant apps, in other words: apps that you do not have to install but can open immediately. Many websites now also use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), so that websites can load even faster on mobile. Where will this market grow in 2018? We think that the so-called 'Lazy Loading' will make a big step in apps. Load data when you have WiFi and are connected to the charger. Spotify with offline playlists and Netflix with offline movies are a good example of this. This is another app trend of 2018 because your content is available faster and accessible everywhere.

You can also use more and more apps before you are registered, so part of the content is often already available before you end up in an annoying registration screen. For example, you can already use the NS Travel Planner app to plan your journey, but if you want to save your journeys you need an account. Or you can already see deals on Social Deals, but only respond once you are registered.

Speed ​​has already caused major revolutions in the web in recent years. About 25% of users leave a website if it doesn't load within two seconds (according to Seositecheckup.com).

The mobile health market is growing by more than 10 percent in 2018 and is on an upward trajectory. With the advent of smart wearables, health can be monitored in real time. For example, the Apple Watch can follow the verge detect when you have a heart rhythm disorder. The more sensors wearables get, the more data there is to measure health. Due to the rapid growth of the possibilities of wearables, we expect that this app trend will have major consequences for health in 2018. The increasingly advanced hardware ensures that the healthcare sector does not have to market its own devices in order to monitor patients. Hospital admissions and natural-cause deaths are likely to fall due to availability.

Everyone can sense that we are extremely close to the self-driving car. Billions are currently being pumped into companies that have the potential to market the first fully self-driving car. 2018 could well be the year that the commercial market of self-driving cars opens up. Not only the self-driving aspect makes cars smart, but also the fact that Apple CarPlay en Android Auto comes with almost every newly produced car makes for smarter cars. Your favorite apps such as Spotify will soon be optimized and available in your car. Furthermore, logical steps would be that, for example, the mirrors, the seat and the steering wheel adjust depending on who is behind the wheel. Opening the garage will soon no longer be necessary with a remote control, the car will communicate that it is there.

Security is becoming more and more important, but not everyone understands its importance. The green lock of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was invented to alert users to the security of the connection to a website. On safe websites you will see a green lock at the top left, but not on unsafe websites. Obviously, but what about apps? Users have no idea if the connection between them and the app is secure. For that reason, we expect that there will be some kind of SSL indication for apps. Recently, the Google Play store already shows "Google Play verified" with a green lock when installing a new app, but this has nothing to do with whether the app uses a secure connection. Apple apps must connect to a secure domain, but then it doesn't matter if the certificate is valid. We expect that Google and Apple will add a green lock for apps that only use SSL securely.