7 Android Predictions for 2019

Emerging technologies not only change the way users interact with their devices but they also improve the development process. One such tech where most features emerge is Google’s Android. The Android App Development platform is coming up with new features every year at a neck-breaking pace These are some of the safest Android predictions which can be made for Android development in the year 2019.

#1 Voice Command and Virtual Assistants

Voice command simply dictates the user’s voice into an electronic word processed document which allows users to operate the system by talking to it and also frees up cognitive working space. It also has some potential drawbacks - it requires a large amount of memory to store voice data files and is difficult to operate in crowded places due to noise interference.

What does it have in store for 2019?

In 2019, voice search is going to create a new user interface that would be a mandate to take into consideration when developing and designing applications in mobile apps. Voice Assistants are gaining much popularity and we can see every big player has the one such as Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, Alexa, Cortana. This will continue to grow in 2019.

Use Case App: Pingpong Board

The use case for voice assistants is to create an application similar to the Ping Pong board. Inside the application, there are two screens: the First screen shows available players with the leaderboard and scores and the second screen displays two players who are playing the game along with their game points.

#2 Chatbots

Chatbots are trending as they support faster customer service at low labor costs by increasing customer satisfaction. However, simple chatbots are often limited to give a response to the customers which could frustrate them whereas complex chatbots cost more, inhibiting their widespread adoption.

What Next?

As per the technology experts, it is predicted the whole world is going to introduce their company by Chatbots. The customer support service will be provided efficiently and the customer feedbacks will also be responded quicker to get the better results.

Chatbots are a takeaway in this digital world as every application or website wants to provide this facility for the improvised customer support. Chatbots can be taken as the small assistants which are integrated into our applications. We can create our one with the help of DialogFlow which is easy to develop without much coding. Nowadays, facebook messenger is used in spite of being a messaging app as many of the chatbots are integrated into it.

Use Case: Allstate chatbot

The largest P&C insurer in America developed its own 'ABle' chatbot to help their agents learn to sell commercial insurance products. The bot teaches agents through the commercial selling process and can extract documents and also understands which product an agent is working on and where are they in the process.

#3 Virtual and Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality systems are highly interactive in nature and operate simultaneously with the real-time environment by reducing the thin line between real and virtual world; enhancing the perceptions and interactions with the real world. It is expensive to develop AR based devices for the desired projects, lack privacy and low-performance level are few drawbacks for the AR compliant devices.

What next?

The hardware for VR is initially driven by the hardcore games and gadget freaks where the mobile hardware is been caught up in some instances excluding the traditional computing platforms. For the real-world uses with Augmented Reality and sensor into the mobile devices like never before, AR and VR are combined to get much better visibility of applications which seems that virtual reality revolution is finally arriving.

Use Case App: MarXent + AR

AR is helping professionals to visualize their final products during the creative process from interior design to architecture and construction. By using the headsets enabled by architects, engineers, and design professionals can step directly into their buildings and spaces to look at how their designs might look and can even make virtual spot changes.

#4 Android App Architecture

Google has finally introduced guidelines after many years to develop the best Android apps. Even you are not forced to use Android architecture components but it is considered a good starting point to build stable applications. The argument about the best pattern for Android - MVC, MVP, MVVM or anything else has turned off and we can trust the solutions from Google which are good enough for all majority of apps.

What next?

The developers always face confusion implementing the multithreading on Android and to solve these problems, tools like Async Task and EventBus are supporting it. Also, we can choose RxJava, Kotlin Coroutines or Android LiveData for multithreading management.

This fetches more stability and less confusion in the developer community. Loads of applications are installed on our mobile devices but we hardly use some of them. For this, Progressive WebApps are becoming popular in e-commerce.

#5 Hybrid Solutions

Big companies like Facebook is leading in utilizing the cross platforms for most of the part, it is a pragmatic approach where the larger the audience the bigger the market share for advertising and subscription revenues.

What Next?

The hybrid mobile applications come with the unified development that can substantially save a good amount of money and provide fast deployment through offline support and bridges the gap between other two approaches providing all the extra functionality with very little overhead. The hybrid applications can possibly result in the loss of performance and make the developer rely on the framework itself to nicely play with the targeted operating system. So, escaping out of the traditional hardware and software solutions, the developers have approached the market aiming to offer a total solution or cross-platform solutions.

#6 Machine Learning

Google switched to AI first from mobile first strategy since some time. This is clearly seen in the TensorFlow and MLKit in the Firebase ecosystem which is gaining popularity for creating simple basic models that do not need expertise in data sciences to make your application intelligent. People are getting more aware of the capabilities of machine learning along with its implementation in Matlab or R for mobile development.

What next?

Machine learning is used in a variety of applications for banking and financial sector, healthcare, retail, publishing and social media etc. Also, used by Google and Facebook to push down relevant advertisements based on past user search. The major challenge is to implement machine learning by implementing different techniques and interpretation of results which is also complex but important not only for image and speech recognition but also for user behavior prediction and analysis.

Machine learning will be utilized in the future for Quantum computing to manipulate and classify large numbers of vectors in high-dimensional spaces. We expect to have better-unsupervised algorithms in building smarter applications that will lead to faster and more accurate outcomes.

#7 Rooting Android

Rooting Android means to get root access or administrative rights for your device. No matter how much you pay for your device the internals of the device is still locked away. With the help of Rooting Android, several advantages are offered of removing the pre-installed OEM applications, ad-blocking for all the apps which is a great benefit to the user.

What next?

As the rooting android installs the incompatible application on your device it can brick your device and it is advised to always get your apps from reliable sources. It does not come with a warranty and a wrong setting can move the wrong item which can cause huge problems. The risk with the rooted devices is that the system might not get well updated later which can create errors. Still, It also provides more display options and internal storage along with the greater battery life and speed. It will also make full device backups and have access to root files.

Conclusion

The year 2019 is going to very interesting for Android app development. We will observe a lot of new technologies emerging that will change the face of mobile development for future use. The developers need to stay up to date with the emerging trends and learn quickly to implement them in designing new products.

We can definitely see a bright future by more good quality apps with even more engaging user interactions. We also expect to have more stable solutions to develop applications which result in better products. It becomes important to observe closely the new trends and become a quick learner in mastering these skills that will be the most important in the future.

Author Bio

Rooney Reeves is a content strategist and a technical blogger associated with eTatvaSoft. An old hand writer by day and an avid reader by night, she has a vast experience in writing about new products, software design, and test-driven methodology.

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