Predictive Analytics Sets a New Stage for Hybrid Mobile App Development

This is the 10-year anniversary of the opening of the App Store. The first apps released included a To Do list, Facebook and AIM app. All of these apps were developed specifically for the iPhone platform.

Over the past ten years, this has been a recurring theme. Developers typically create their apps for a specific platform. If they plan to reach customers across different devices, they need to create different versions for each. This is known as native application development. However, a growing number of developers are developing applications that can be used across different platforms. This new approach is known as hybrid mobile app development.

Hybrid app development seems like a no-brainer since developers are now able to easily create code that is compatible across different devices. However, it has raised other challenges as well.

Predictive analytics is helping address the challenges and capitalise off of the opportunities that hybrid app development presents. Here are some of the roles that it is starting to play.

Responding to future security risks

Mobile app security is a serious concern in 2018. According to the 2016 NowSecure mobile security report, 25% of mobile apps have a high-risk security flaw. Trend Micro conducted a study the following year, which found there was a 415% increase in malware samples between 2016 and 2017.

Some factors have played a role in the increased ransomware and malware threats. Predictive analytics helps tackle these challenges in several ways:

• They can pinpoint be security flaws that most hackers exploit. If they identify the flaws that are most vulnerable in every known device, they will need to develop separate patches for them.
• Since hybrid app developers distribute their applications to a wider base of users, they will face greater publicity risks if one of their applications are compromised. The public would be even less forgiving if they failed to prevent widely known attacks. This means they will need to identify the types of attacks that hackers are most likely orchestrate in the future. Predictive analytics can help them identify these vulnerabilities long before they are first exploited.

Predictive analytics has been at the forefront of the crusade against cyber attacks over the last couple of years. It will be incorporated into hybrid mobile application development as well as it becomes more prevalent.

Identifying top user needs to boost UX

There are several benefits of hybrid app development, including better scalability and reduced development cost. However, user experience is one of the dimensions where native app development has a clear advantage. The problem is that hybrid apps need to conform to multiple UI specifications, which takes time to resolve. This can lead to a time lag that hinders his performance.

This doesn’t mean that hybrid app developers can’t try to compete on the same playing field. However, they are going to need to have a more informed understanding of their customers’ needs.  By improving UX optimisation, they may make up for sluggish performance of their applications.

Furthermore, predictive analytics is helping improve the processing speeds of different mobile applications. This can offset the grievances customers have about hybrid apps that don’t compile quickly enough.

Identifying market demand for developers with low budgets

Creating profitable mobile applications is not easy. In fact, Wednesday from Gartner showed that only about 0.01% of all mobile applications would be profitable within the next couple of years.

This is a clear concern for many technology startups. They have limited budgets and need to generate a high ROI to justify their initial investments.

This is possibly the most important area where predictive analytics comes into play. They can use sophisticated algorithms to gauge customer demand. This ensures that they will invest resources developing apps that have a chance of being profitable.

Predictive analytics is helping with hybrid app development

Hybrid application development is becoming more popular, but some important challenges remain. Fortunately, predictive analytics is helping overcome them. It will lead to a leaner marketplace with more profitable apps and greater UX. What more could customers ask for?