Mobile Development Trends Every iOS Developer Should Know in 2022

Hi, I'm Anna Pomazanova, the iOS Developer at NIX United. For nine years in the IT industry, I worked as a project technical lead, mentor, and speaker.

Suppose you don’t know which framework is better to choose for improving your skill. Or perhaps you’re just looking in the iOS direction and you want to have in-demand skills when you enter the field. Or maybe you’re planning to launch a startup in a trending industry or area. If any of these is the case for you, this article will be helpful. It doesn't matter if you’re an experienced developer or are just starting to get interested in mobile development — you always need to improve the quality of your code and its optimization. Moreover, you need to understand why you are creating IT products in general, following trends, and studying technologies in the spirit of the times.

To understand which technologies to focus on, I suggest considering the main directions in mobile development and the most popular frameworks from Apple. I want to note that the IT domain is developing dynamically and rapidly, and what is most popular today may be less in demand in the near future. I’ll share with you the most relevant technologies, in my opinion, for the beginning of 2022.

Technologies are rapidly developing, and they become outdated very quickly. To stay at the top of their game, developers need to constantly improve, replenish their knowledge and skills, and keep abreast of new products in the IT industry. Mobile devices are no longer just about communication or entertainment.

Modern gadgets have firmly entered our lives and become an integral part of them. What makes them essential and irreplaceable is the so-called "stuffing"—those applications that teach and develop us, solve problems and help monitor our health, calm and entertain, and allow us to spend and earn. If we approach this from a business point of view, then the developed product should help carry out our daily affairs and do it faster and better than competitors. Users must know how much, in what moments, and for what purposes their personal data is used in a particular application.

Health Apps

We live in the frantic pace of modern life and sometimes completely forget to take care of ourselves. This is when wellness applications come to the rescue. These include apps for tracking water intake, calorie counters, automated diet adjustments based on health and biometric parameters, medication apps and health diaries, fitness trackers, hygiene assistants, and more.

An interesting fact: one of these apps, Loona, won this year's Apple Design Awards. This fact once again confirms the relevance of this category. Below are more examples of popular wellness apps.

Apple Health

Among wellness software, health-related apps hold a special place. Of course, this is facilitated by the trend for a healthy lifestyle and fashionable gadgets to monitor the state of your body, as well as the presence of powerful and constantly operating mobile devices capable of storing and processing information (for example, sensors for measuring the quality of sleep, heart rate, blood sugar, and oxygen levels and others). Accordingly, all this data needs to be aggregated, stored, and processed somewhere. Apple’s Health app is one example of an app that does this. It syncs with third-party health apps and stores all the data received from them in one place and also displays all information from various sources about the user's physical condition.

HealthKit, ResearchKit, and CareKit

For developers, Apple also introduced solutions for working with medical data in the HealthKit, CareKit, and ResearchKit frameworks.
HealthKit is a framework that enables developers to read, share, and store data securely on a device. Most of the data that appears in Apple Health can be used in your app (provided the user grants it permission to do so).

CareKit allows developers to create applications to help people recover from illness. The framework provides a set of interfaces that will help create modules for treatment and rehabilitation plans, tracking daily recovery processes, medication schedules, and more. Both patients and healthcare professionals can use CareKit-based applications.

ResearchKit provides interfaces for building medical research applications. It allows developers to collect data (with the user's consent) used in research. For example, many applications have played essential roles in studying asthma, postpartum depression, and cardiovascular disease.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, health-related apps have become even more popular. The situation has brought together two constantly competing tech giants — Apple and Google — who jointly developed__contact tracing technology__ to track physical contact with those infected by COVID-19.

Video Communication

The call "Stay Home, Be Safe" has changed how we work and communicate. It turned out that many things can be done remotely without sacrificing much efficiency and quality.

For example, video calling software has become one of the most in-demand tools in 2020 and is maintaining popularity. Below are some of the more popular video communication apps.

FaceTime & SharePlay

The popularity of video calling apps has pushed Apple to modernize FaceTime. The program allows users of other platforms, including Windows and Android, to view videos in video chat mode, listen to music, share screens, and connect via a link.

Apple claims that for more natural conversation, individual voices will sound as if they are coming from the direction each person is positioned on the screen, thanks to spatial audio technology. In addition, the crystal transparent noise cancellation mode will muffle all extraneous noises, including the annoying neighbor's drill. All this is possible with the help of the new SharePlay framework, which is available for integration into your applications.

Internet of Things (IoT)

In the past, the concept of IoT was rarely seen in everyday life. Now, this technology is everywhere: in houses, offices, on the street, even in the small village where my grandmother lives. So many people have smart devices, from fitness trackers and robotic vacuum cleaners to entire systems with sensors and devices throughout the apartment. Their demand grows every year, so IoT app development is a promising niche.

If not in our smartphones, where else will we look at data from our smart toothbrushes? And sometimes, a person does not even need to operate the device—many things are fully automated. Take the smart home as an example — what if you forgot to turn off the iron? Catastrophe! But with smart home technology, you don't have to worry: the iron will turn off automatically as soon as you close the door behind you. In addition, IoT technologies are widely used in industry, agriculture, healthcare, energy, and urban management.

Apple Home & HomeKit

Usually, an IoT system consists of devices with sensors and a cloud platform to which they are connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and/or LAN. Devices collect data and send it to the cloud, and the application processes it. IoT apps allow you to visualize data, track metrics, and manage connected devices.

Apple Home is Apple's smart home control solution. The platform syncs with compatible network devices and allows them to be controlled using a set of interfaces provided by the HomeKit framework. These devices — locks, light bulbs, thermostats, and others — are usually created by third-party manufacturers. And, while earlier, Apple required companies to install specific chips into their devices to support HomeKit, now this procedure has become much easier — developers only need to get certification from Apple. In truth, despite various attempts by Apple to popularize HomeKit, it’s still poorly adopted by third-party devices, and often developers have to use the old CoreBluetooth to work with third-party devices.

On-demand Apps

On-demand apps are rapidly gaining popularity. Whereas before the phrase "I want it here and now" concerned mainly pizza delivery and calling a taxi, now it applies to a wide variety of areas. Among them: courier services, shops, services like "washing at home" or "husband for an hour," and beauty salons. All of these can provide you services practically anywhere. Below are some more examples of popular on-demand frameworks and apps.

CoreLocation

Mobile devices have taught users that they are no longer tied to their homes or workplaces. Almost everything has become virtual — available anytime, anywhere. Smartphones have made it easy for us to communicate our location. Telling the whole world exactly where you are has become a common thing, and in this case, it becomes easier to report this information to many services. CoreLocation is Apple's geolocation framework where developers can quickly locate destinations, display maps, search, and get directions using interfaces.

M-commerce applications

M-commerce is traded through mobile apps or mobile websites. Mass digitization and social exclusion have boosted the development of the eCommerce industry, and consumers are increasingly looking to shop online.

Studies show that the number of transactions via mobile gadgets is constantly increasing. According to Oberlo, over 70% of purchases were made via mobile devices in 2021. At the same time, mobile wallets will become the preferred payment method, as users are increasingly turning to mobile payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet. These options are fast, secure, and have flexible payment terms.

Augmented Reality

According to various estimates, augmented reality is one of the main trends in digital marketing for 2021. Indeed, with the advancement of technology, AR capabilities will only grow. The phrase "augmented reality," in general, says it all — the set technologies complement the world of real objects around us with virtual objects created on a computer or mobile device (not to be confused with VR, which creates new virtual environments).

The basic principle of AR is as follows: it identifies specific markers (for example, the user's face) in the real world through the camera, transfers them to the virtual environment, and layer by layer, applies additional features or objects. Thus, the world of AR is created. AR is widespread in medical-related applications, design applications, the film industry, games, advertising applications, and more.

For example, in the Ikea Place app, a customer can choose a product by previewing a life-sized, digital version of it in their room in real-time. In Complete Anatomy, users can study the structure of the human body. Applaydu brings Kinder toys to life, and in Living Wine Labels, etiquette heroes tell stories.

ARKit & RealityKit

A few years ago, Apple introduced its ARKit and RealityKit suite of augmented reality tools.

The main task of ARKit is to monitor the surrounding world using a camera and unique sensors and create virtual models of the real world. It also takes care of all the calculations associated with drawing shadows and camera movements.

RealityKit allows you to render, create animations, and change the physical properties of these objects (such as color or size). This year, Apple introduced RealityKit 2, which added a new Object Capture module that allows developers to create high-quality, realistic 3D models of physical objects in just a few minutes. Take a photo with your iPhone, iPad, or a separate digital camera and convert it into a 3D object optimized for AR.

Artificial Intelligence

Today artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the tech market. This term refers to the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. When it comes to AI, we imagine a huge supercomputer the size of a hangar (an image inspired by science fiction films). But in fact, AI is widely used in our mobile applications: various chatbots, photo and video editors, voice assistants, content generation, and much more.

Machine Learning

Machine learning (ML) is arguably the most promising and challenging area of ​​AI. It's a whole science of getting AI to learn and act like a human and making it constantly improve its learning and abilities based on the real-world data we provide it.

Core ML

Core ML is a framework that allows you to easily integrate ML into applications and create various smart features. For example, it will enable you to add real-time image recognition, faces, images and sounds, handwriting, image stylization, voice identification, and more.

ShazamKit

A few years ago, Apple bought the Shazam music recognition service, which can, thanks to a huge media library, determine which song is playing right now by recording a small fragment of the melody, even with background noise. And this year Apple presented the ShazamKit framework, which is already available for integration into applications.

Siri & SiriKit

Siri processes a person's speech, gives recommendations, answers users’ questions, performs specific operations, and is generally an integral part of the operating systems of the Apple ecosystem. SiriKit is an API provided by Apple for integrating apps with Siri.

Speed ​​and Fast Access

All users love speed. It is often essential for us to get quick access to certain functionality, so the popularity of widgets and App Clips is recently gaining momentum.

Widgets

Widgets show up-to-date information at a glance without launching the main mobile app. The primary purpose of the widget is to show the user a small amount of relevant data at a given time. WidgetKit is a framework providing access to the app's capabilities by bringing the widget to the Home Screen in iOS or the Notification Center in macOS.

App Clips

App Clips is a small part of an app — no more than 10 MB in size — allowing users to quickly complete a specific task without downloading and installing the full version. It focuses on one function, such as ordering food, renting a bike, or booking a restaurant table, and is automatically deleted by the system after use.  If you find the app useful, you can download its full version at any time.

Data Security and Privacy

Security remains one of the main requirements for a mobile application. Most of us are faced with the situation where you browse for something online, and over the next few weeks, you see ads for the same thing. Unfortunately, no one is surprised by this apparent leakage of personal information.

Over the past few years, Apple has been trying to turn its operating system into an impregnable bastion, which, of course, leads to tightening the screws for us, the developers.

Requirements for access to the personal data of the user are becoming more stringent. There are more and more rules and app reviews required by the company before publishing it in the App Store.

In Conclusion

Times are changing rapidly. Mobile applications are gaining popularity every day and are firmly embedded in our daily lives. The trends of mobile applications described above are exactly what our future will look like, which means that it is simply necessary to follow them.