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Mobile will Eat the World in 2017, says Forrester


What to expect from mobile technology in 2017? If the research firm Forrester is to be believed, its report “Predictions 2017: Mobile Is The Face Of Digital” portrays a world in which mobile will continue its rapid growth and become the primary way that consumers interact with businesses and the way businesses operate internally. This means that we will see big changes in enterprises’ mobile strategies and the way they develop apps and who will be developing these apps.

Forrester’s Julie Ask notes in her blog about the report that “In 2016 mobile evolved from a stand-alone channel to a baseline for all branded digital experiences. In 2017, mobile will continue to elevate customer expectations as it transforms even non-digital experiences – such as Starbucks ‘order ahead’ functionality.”
That doesn’t mean that mobile apps alone will rule the world. The report says thatForrester Logo

Moving beyond mobile apps

Forrester believes that “app fatigue” has set in among many people and that, as a result, companies need to build an entire mobile portfolio rather than simply depend on using apps to reach consumers. Ask says, “Mobile is a gateway to new interactions that are rapidly gaining customers’ mobile moments – such as messaging, services on connected devices, instant messaging apps, chatbots, virtual assistants and beyond.”

That’s already started to happen. As I reported in my blog post, “Why Artificial Intelligence Will Be Big in Mobile App Development in 2017,” artificial intelligence is being used to create bots to help people order online, and will use machine learning and input from the sensors to make recommendations to people about what they should be doing next.

Mobile apps are not going away, the report says, and they’ll still remain an important way to reach consumers. But enterprises will need to build out additional mobile platforms. Ask explains, "We call this app-plus, where a company will still have to have an app in many cases, but will also have a portfolio of mobile services like a presence on Facebook Messenger or in various chatbots.”

This focus on multiple ways of reaching people using mobile will put a strain on enterprises, who will hire many more mobile developers in 2017. So, expect 2017 to be the year that enterprises do less outsourcing, and hire more in-house mobile staff, with some Fortune 100 companies growing their mobile staffs to hundreds of developers, the report says. And those developers will have to become experts in multiple mobile channels.

Learn more about how Alpha Anywhere lets you build rapidly build offline-capable mobile apps across multiple platforms and the web from a single codebase.

Read how Alpha Anywhere makes mobile cross-platform development simple

Read more 2017 predictions.
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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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