Top 7 MobileApp Development Trends for 2024

Projected to get 189 billion installs and generate a revenue of $186 billion by 2027, the mobile application industry is seeing rapid growth, according to Sensor Tower. Allied Market Research reports that the worldwide mobile app market is anticipated to climb from $208.5 billion in 2022 to $777.4 billion by 2032, progressing at a CAGR of 14.4% during the indicated period.

The key drivers are the increasing number of smartphones, the rising demand for wearables, and the widespread adoption of transformative technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), and the internet of things (IoT). If you aim to build a mobile solution, it is important to keep an eye on the latest tendencies that will offer new opportunities to entrepreneurs and consumers.

In this article, we will describe the top mobile app development trends for 2024 that you should consider for your project. The list is based on our analysis of the current domain situation, user behavior, and market forecasts. Have a look.

Top mobile app development trends for 2024

1. The rise of Photo & Video and Entertainment app categories

The revenue generated by mobile games on the App Store has witnessed a decline recently, with predictions to decrease from 58% in 2022 to 47% in 2027, as reported by Sensor Tower. The primary reason for this shift lies in changing consumer preferences.

Now, with the growing interest in short-form videos, the popularity of mobile products from Photo & Video and Entertainment categories is rapidly increasing. As people spend more time and money on video-sharing and photo-editing solutions, you can freely invest in this mobile app development trend. TikTok, YouTube, Afterlight, CapCut, and InShot are one of the most well-known products that have captivated the audience’s attention.

If you decide to start a project of this kind, consider implementing features like AI-based content creation/editing, smart filters, sound effects, music blending, and animated stickers.

At Aligned Code, we’ve recently built a mobile app that enables users to watch funny engaging content and film real-life actions in short videos. The idea was to bring a more gamified user experience to the social media world. With the MVP, the client managed to raise $1.5 million. Read the case study to learn more about the project.

2. Exponential growth of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is among the most fundamental mobile app development trends for 2024. The world’s AI market size accounted for $136.55 billion in 2022 and is projected to see exponential growth in the upcoming years. According to Grand View Research, the AI market will amount to $1,811.8 billion by 2030, progressing at a CAGR of 37.3% during 2023–2030.

AI-powered mobile applications have a number of use cases, involving natural language processing, image recognition, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis. Artificial intelligence covers a range of fields that include marketing, customer service, product making, supply chain control, and research.

Furthermore, AI solutions can enable software engineers to optimize their apps for better performance, user experience, security, and scalability. For example, AI helps analyze the audience’s feedback, identify bugs, detect anomalies, and improve code quality.

Using AI-based apps, enterprises and institutions can maximize staff productivity, boost consumer satisfaction, gain actionable data insights, automate manual tasks, improve decision-making, minimize human errors, and optimize costs.

Since the technology brings various benefits and opportunities to businesses, it will continue to be one of the top mobile app development trends in not only 2024 but far beyond, especially with generative AI penetrating the market.

3. The widespread adoption of IoT mobile apps

The rise of the internet of things will be among the top trends in mobile app development for 2024. Statista says that the global IoT market is anticipated to witness a significant revenue increase, reaching $1,387 billion by 2024 and $2,227 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 12.57% during the forecast period.

Analysts expect that automotive IoT solutions will dominate the landscape, with the market volume valued at $494.20 billion. Smart homes, remote patient monitoring, and inventory tracking are other examples of IoT usage.

The emergence and adoption of 5G technology is another market driver. With 5G, IoT apps will be able to leverage faster speed, lower latency, and higher bandwidth to deliver seamless and real-time experiences.

In this context, IoT engineers will need to consider security, scalability, and interoperability as key challenges in 2024. Hence, if you plan to start an IoT project, it is crucial to hire an experienced IoT development company.

Employing IoT mobile applications, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, provide personalized services, optimize resource utilization, prevent failures, and a lot more. As a result, firms and institutions boost efficiency, improve client satisfaction, cut expenditures, and generate new revenue streams.

4. The increased demand for blockchain apps

Representing the decentralized distributed ledger technology, blockchain has been mainly associated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, today blockchain apps are used across multiple domains, for example, healthcare, logistics, and gaming.

At the moment, the blockchain services market is expected to spike from $4.7 billion in 2023 to $6.75 billion in 2024, registering a CAGR of 43.6% during the indicated period. The key drivers are the growing cryptocurrencies’ use, increased data security concerns, the need for greater supply chain traceability, and the adoption of smart contracts.

Blockchain is poised to remain among the top mobile app development trends in the upcoming years, too. Experts predict that the blockchain services market will amount to $27.39 billion in 2028—at a CAGR of 41.9%—backed by the rising popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital assets, and decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions.

Blockchain technology allows firms and institutions to remove intermediaries from operations, reduce transaction costs, ensure data privacy, protect digital rights, achieve the authenticity of goods, enable secure data sharing, and prevent fraud.

5. The growing consumption of cloud computing

To build software before, companies acquired licenses, configured infrastructure on-premise, and purchased hardware. This way, organizations had to install servers, scale resources, and maintain infrastructure on their own, which required time, costs, and effort.

Cloud computing emerged to address these issues. In fact, this model is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, software, and analytics over the Internet. Therefore, users can access their data and solution functionality from any device, from any place.

Using cloud computing, it is possible to speed up software development, increase storage capacity, achieve app performance, ensure high availability, and cut down expenses.

What’s more, cloud computing allows software engineers to enforce security by providing encryption, backup, recovery, and audit features. Uber, Netflix, Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox are examples of globally recognized cloud-based applications.

Since cloud computing offers plenty of benefits and is used by any business on a daily basis, the demand for cloud software is rapidly growing.

The market size is anticipated to spike from $0.68 trillion in 2024 to $1.44 trillion by 2029, at a CAGR of 16.4% during this period. The widespread adoption of AI and big data technologies also contributes to market surge. So, cloud computing is among the main mobile app development trends for 2024 and the coming years.

6. The increasing popularity and new opportunities of Swift

Swift is the primary programming language to build native iOS applications and one of the top mobile app development trends in 2024. This modern and powerful language has features like generics, protocols, closures, and optionals. On top of that, Swift uses artificial intelligence to provide smart code completion, refactoring, and debugging.

Designed to work seamlessly with Apple's frameworks and platforms, Swift allows software engineers to create interactive mobile solutions powered by augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and machine learning (ML). Swift also supports cross-platform development, enabling programmers to reuse code and logic across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux.

It is worth noting that Swift is constantly evolving and improving, with new versions regularly shipped by Apple and the open-source community.

In 2024, the mobile app development world expects to see the launch of Swift 6 that will introduce concurrency, actors, existentials, property wrappers, and other features, making Swift more safe and performant. However, there is no official release date for Swift 6 yet, as the team is working on improving the core fundamentals and software ecosystem.

7. Metaverse mobile apps will be gaining traction

Metaverse is among the most game-changing mobile app development trends for 2024 that has been gathering pace in recent years. Statista reports that the metaverse market size is expected to climb from $74.4 billion in 2024 to $507.8 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 37.73% during the forecast period.

Analysts predict that metaverse user penetration will increase to 39.7% by 2030, up from 14.6% in 2024. Furthermore, 66% of Internet users believe the metaverse can partially (24%) or completely (42%) replace social media as we know it.

In the metaverse, people can create personal avatars in a virtual world and do anything they do in real life, for instance, interact with other users, get a job, attend events, or go shopping. In fact, metaverse brings physical and digital worlds together.

This year, we will likely see the increasing adoption of metaverse experiences in mobile apps or through upcoming super app ecosystems. Now, industry giants such as Microsoft, Roblox, Decentraland, and Meta are working on the reimagination of social network applications to offer a virtual world where users can communicate, cooperate, game, and participate in various activities together.

Powered by AR, VR, blockchain, and AI, metaverse can help users receive a new kind of entertainment, travel the world from home, extend imagination, meet new friends, gain new opportunities in education, enhance various skills, and even overcome disabilities.

Summing it up

The mobile development industry is constantly evolving to meet changing user preferences, attract the audience, and generate profit. In 2024, we expect to see the growing number of innovative mobile products powered by AI, IoT, blockchain, metaverse, and other cutting-edge technologies.

In this context, it is important to consider the top mobile app development trends and stay ahead of the market. By exploring new opportunities, startups, enterprises, and institutions can grow their user bases significantly, outrun competitors, and increase revenues.

If you’re thinking about building a top-notch mobile project, feel free to contact us. Our software experts will come back to you within a business day and help address all the required issues.