Development and Tech trends 2020 Revisited

Technology moves fast as the world is changing. Predicting the future always was difficult. But Predicting the future of Tech is even more challenging and risky even due to the long term trends.

At the beginning of 2020 dozens of articles with alleged trends, that we would need to keep an eye on this year, were posted. But due to the dramatic changes caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, it’s time to revisit them. And see which ones are still relevant and define the new upcoming trends. 

5G

Now 4G is taken for granted and can feel unbearably slow sometimes. But it seems even crazier to understand that in 2010 the 3G was new to us and we were just fine with it. Luckily, 2020 is expected to be the year that the consumers would put their hands on the fifth generation of mobile data. 

Being an innovative wireless communication technology, 5G provides smartphone users with better mobile broadband, improved experiences, as well as faster upload and download speeds. The impact of 5G could not be overrated beside obvious – Internet of Things, VR and AR development it will effect:

Environment. The advanced speed will allow devices to connect, transform data on weather conditions, crop health, plant health, moisture, chemical and mineral levels, pest presence and more, affecting cost management, labor allocation, yield and waste reduction.

Health care. With this level of technology, hospitals will not only be able to work remotely with patients and diagnose their complaints, but will have the ability to perform surgeries from any world location and other hands-on procedures using digital avatars. 

Smart buildings technologies. The similar sensors already exist but the 5G will allow getting the full automated control of every building system including HVAC, lighting, fire, security, energy and water use by combining data from multiple structures and systems. 

Manufacturing. Industry 4.0 and end-to-end automation using IIoT, are tremendously promising areas of 5G application.

Smart cities technologies. Like the smart buildings concept but more global. IoT sensors will monitor and collect data on everything from air quality to energy use, to traffic patterns. 5G will be able to use artificial intelligence to analyze the massive amounts of data being collected to automate processes that are currently done manually.

Transportation. The march toward self-driving vehicles is already well thought out. The ability to communicate in real-time with other nearby vehicles and with fixed roadway infrastructure will be essential to its success, and 5G will be embedded in all of them.

According to Statista by 2021, the number of 5G-enabled connections is anticipated to grow to 20-100 million. The global spending on 5G mobile infrastructure is projected to reach about $2.3B by 2021.

The rise of AI & AR

The overall expectations are pretty high because of the arrival of 5G technology. Driven by the power of faster data, we can expect to see AI leverage the power of convenience via enhanced automation. It has been quickly evolving over the last several years. And representing some of our most optimistic (identifying hate speech, reducing fake news) and feared (deep fakes, face recognition, privacy intrusion) advances in engineering. 

Companies like Facebook and Google are looking to leverage AI to help continue their growth and bring in revenue. Hardware like AlterEgo is already being designed to act as a mind-reading wearable headset, while fast-food companies like Dominos are attempting to harness the potential of drones and robot delivery services for the not-too-distant future. 

On the other hand, Augmented Reality is pretty much everywhere when it comes to entertainment and gaming – and these two will be extremely relevant in the quarantine situation. But AR is not only about that. Companies like Mesmerise focus on crafting AR, VR & MR experiences for businesses (e.g. interactive content for publishers). It’s also widely used for learning, training and has dozens more of use cases.

Social distancing and Remote working support

Pretty obvious at this point but to keep the employees safe a big part of companies made a decision to move remotely. It may not seem related to the dev trends at first but not many of the businesses were prepared for this. One of the impacts would be the growth of the team and task management software need. To minimize the expenses and keep floating the team should be efficient with clear and build-out processes. And business automation solutions are here to help.

For the company leaders reduce the burn rate wherever possible would be a priority. Even if it means stopping salary increases, freezing hiring, reducing the headcount of low performers, reaping the savings from canceled events, and significantly decreasing marketing. For lots of employees, it could become a reason to look for another job.  In the pandemic situation, there is one obvious solution – freelance platforms. So the freelance industry expectedly will grow a lot. 

Social distancing could be hard mentally and physically so the platforms for – Fitness, Meditation,  Entertainment, food/meds delivery will be on their peak.  

UI/UX trends –  Enhanced design and Motion UI

Motion User Interface is one of the latest trends in UI development. It’s getting harder to hold users’ attention so that they could at least understand what your service or product is about. So, Motion UI has become and will remain a great attention-grabber that can satisfy the demand for interactive web design. This Saas library for creating UI transitions and animations for your web solution helps developers animate content without having a comprehensive knowledge of technologies like JavaScript, its frameworks and libraries. Motion UI components will enhance web application design, thus improving user engagement and app usability.

Another trend in UI/UX design for websites and web apps is that with the rise of mobile users, responsiveness has become necessary. Besides, it’s nice to know that you are on a par with such organizations as Apple, Adobe, Stripe, Booking.com, and Adidas in terms of responsiveness.

-Hybrid, -Multi Clouds

Besides the strong growth of SaaS and PaaS companies are no longer using just one cloud provider. They are moving to multi-cloud, using a combination of multiple providers (AWS, Heroku, Azure, and so on) to gain the benefits and geographical reach of all these platforms.

In fact, according to a recent survey by Gartner, 81% of companies are using two or more cloud providers. Respondents to the survey cited a wide variety of reasons for moving to multi-cloud, which include the following:

1. minimizing vendor lock-in
2. performance
3. regulatory requirements
4. labor costs
5. governance
6. disaster recovery
7. easier data migration

With these reasons, you will likely need to become comfortable with more than one cloud provider in the near future, if you aren’t already. Additionally, if you have expertise in more than one cloud provider, then you have a head start on staying relevant for years to come.

IT outsourcing

As IT outsourcing offers qualified engineers at a lower cost across different regions and specializations, more and more organizations worldwide are choosing it instead of in-house developers. Especially in the nowadays pandemic situation most of the businesses remain unprepared to move online so outsourcing is a great solution to the case. According to Technavio’s predictions for 2018, its market size will reach $409B by 2022. 

Technavio’s research also revealed that increasing demand for business process optimization will become one of its major drivers during 2020-2021.

Since mobile and web development requires professionals in different IT spheres, companies are looking for not only programmers but testers, solution architects, UI/UX designers, business analysts, consultants, marketers, and project managers.

Conclusions

For the most part, trends seem pretty stable a few last years, adding to the list above a Blockchain, Bigdata, Cybersecurity. But there’s always something unexpected bringing some industries up or down. Going back when the situation is changing is a valuable experience to define the vector of moving and stable things that would be important in the long term.