Top 10 Software Development Trends for 2021 You Need to Know

Today we are seeing the fast digital transformation that affects all life spheres including business, healthcare, manufacturing, and entertainment. Every day people use Artificial Intelligence-enabled programs like Gmail, Google predictive searches, personalized product recommendations even without noticing this. 

Many logistics and manufacturing companies are already using robots to automate operations and optimize costs. Everyone has heard of cryptocurrencies that were a totally new concept when Bitcoin was launched in 2009. Now, almost 11 years later, there are over a thousand of them. Mobile apps, online shops, social networks have become irreplaceable tools to buy, sell, and promote goods/services.

In this article, we’ve collected 10 software development trends that will take the center stage in 2020-2021. See them below!

1. Internet of Things

IoT growth is one of the main technology trends in 2021. By connecting sensors, devices, machines, vehicles, it has a great impact on our world. There are many IoT use cases across different industries involving: 

• connected cars
• remote equipment/inventory tracking
• traffic/environmental monitoring
• bedside telemetry
• remote patient health management
• connected oil field exploration
• construction machinery management
• digital signage
• supply chain traceability
• smart home automation
• water/energy consumption monitoring
• other.

Statista predicts the global IoT market revenue will reach about $1.6 trillion by 2025. Construction, telecommunication, healthcare are those sectors that will see the fastest compound annual growth rates (CAGR), with 15.0%, 14.2%, and 13.6% respectively (IDC report).

IoT can offer various advantages, allowing businesses to collect large data amounts, accelerate different processes, prevent equipment breakdown, ensure inventory management without losses, reduce operating costs.

2. Artificial Intelligence

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the global Artificial Intelligence market will reach $190.61B by 2025 from $21.46B in 2018, at a CAGR of 36.62% during the indicated period. Such quick growth is mainly explained by factors like increasing big data amounts, growing cloud usage, increasing demand for workflow automation, and wide adoption of personal digital assistants.

There are various AI applications: robots, chatbots, machine learning algorithms, image/text recognition software, data filtering, data analytics, sales forecasting, etc.

AI provides businesses with numerous benefits, allowing them to significantly streamline operations, reduce costs, boost productivity, improve customer service, increase performance, etc. Furthermore, AI has been already employed in art and content generation. Yet today, AI can paint pictures and create beautiful images. 

3. Blockchain

While nobody knew what blockchain was until its appearance as the technology behind Bitcoin, now it’s being widely adopted in various areas. Representing a decentralized digital data record, it provides safe information storage and enables secure transactions without third-parties.

Although it may seem that blockchain solutions are mainly used in banking and finance, their applications spread across almost every sector. Healthcare, logistics, insurance, agriculture, real estate, manufacturing, automotive, stock trading, crowdfunding, etc. are those industries that can benefit from using them.

It also introduced Ethereum (it is an open-source blockchain-based distributed computing platform) smart contracts—self-executing contracts containing agreement terms between two parties and written directly into the code. Automatically monitoring its completion and removing intermediaries, they can also be employed in the above-mentioned fields.

Blockchain market predictions for the coming years:

• Market Study Report informs the worldwide blockchain market which amounted $708 million in 2017, is projected to grow to $60.7 billion in 2024. 
• By 2025, 55% of healthcare applications will have integrated blockchain solutions for commercial use (Statista).
• U.S. spending on blockchain initiatives is anticipated to reach about $4.2 billion in 2021, making it a regional investment leader (Statista). 
• The global blockchain market value in the food and agriculture industry is predicted to amount nearly $1.4 billion by 2028, from $32.2 million in 2017 (Statista).

Yet today, organizations are adopting blockchain to protect from counterfeit, enable supply chain traceability, safely store and exchange data. Since spendings on it are rapidly growing, it will be one of the most important technology trends 2021.

4. Big Data

As Statista reports, the worldwide big data market is anticipated to reach $103 billion by 2027. Just imagine: internet users generate nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day (according to Data Never Sleeps 5.0)!

Increasing big data employment is one of the top technology trends of 2021. Allowing to capture, store, analyze, and visualize large amounts of raw and unstructured data, they transform it into valuable information. 

Data can be taken from almost everywhere: video/audio records, emails, smart devices, web/mobile apps, social media channels, reviews, polls, surveys, transcripts, call logs, corporate sources, online archives, etc.

Being used in different industries, big data processing tools can provide advantages like predictive analytics, efficient risk management, deep insights into customer behavior, enhanced lead generation, improved advertising campaigns, customer experience management, and accurate credit scoring.  

5. Mixed Reality

Representing the merging of real and virtual worlds, comprising both AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality), Mixed Reality forms immersive environments with either physical or digital objects interacting in real-time. 

According to Juniper Research, published in 2019, the mobile MR market value will amount over $43 billion by 2024, growing from $8B in 2019. 75% of MR-enabled applications are expected to be delivered via mobile by 2024. This research also predicts that 40% of MR solutions will be for social media.

Combining AR and VR technologies, Mixed Reality is transforming industries such as entertainment, simulation-based learning, art, healthcare, retail, remote working, historical reconstruction, and military training. 

6. Continuous integration + continuous deployment

Continuous integration + continuous deployment (CI/CD) will continue to be one of the latest software development trends in 2021. Representing one of the best practices, it enables IT services vendors to streamline programming processes and improve the end-solution quality. 

CI allows specialists to speed up app assemblies due to instant error detection and code changes. What’s more, they are empowered to put their code into a shared repository with each check-in being verified. Thanks to this, bugs and errors are immediately found and can be fixed much more quickly. 

The key task of continuous deployment is to accelerate application updates’ delivery. In the CD, every change in the code goes through automated tests to assemble builds and move to production through multiple production deploys. 

Hence, a CI/CD approach enables teams to release apps much faster. In our custom software development company, we employ it to reduce time-to-market, increase app quality, and provide more frequent updates. Due to saved time, this practice lets specialists focus on more complicated tasks. 

7. 5G

Being an innovative wireless communication technology, 5G provides smartphone users with better mobile broadband, improved experiences, as well as faster download and upload speeds. By 2021, the number of 5G-enabled connections is anticipated to grow to 20-100 million (Statista). The global spending on 5G mobile infrastructure is projected to reach about $2.3B by 2021.

5G is intended to ensure enhanced data security. Furthermore, VR and AR development will also improve due to better connections, speed, and experiences.

8. Progressive Web Apps

Progressive web apps are another trend that you should know about. A PWA is a mix of a website and mobile application functionality acting as a native solution. Offering users an immersive full-screen experience, it can be installed directly from the site and live on the smartphone’s home screen. Therefore, you don’t have to open the app store. 

Enhanced performance, engaging UX (user experience), faster loading time, less data usage are the key PWA advantages. Many world-famous companies and projects such as Forbes, Twitter, AliExpress, Pinterest, Lancôme, Flipkart, BookMyShow, and MakeMyTrip have already integrated PWA solutions. 

A few years ago, AliExpress, a popular e-commerce website, decided to build a progressive web app for providing customers with seamless user experience and fast loading speed. Due to PWA integration, the company achieved outstanding results: 104% increase in conversions for new users, 82% increase of the conversion rate for iOS users, 2x more pages seen per one session, 74% increase in time per session.

9. Cybersecurity

According to forecasts by Cybersecurity Ventures, by 2021 damage inflicted from cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually, which exceeds the damage caused by natural disasters. In today’s era of cyberattacks and threats, the establishment of strong safeguards has become especially important. This encourages everyone—government entities, corporations, small/medium-sized businesses—to integrate security solutions.

Statistics on the cybersecurity market:

• The worldwide cybersecurity market will amount $248.26 billion by 2023 (Statista) and $300 billion by 2024 (Global Market Insights)—from $120B in 2017. 
• Global spending on security digital products is anticipated to grow from $103.1 billion in 2019 to $133.8 billion by 2022 (IDC report).

In order to prevent fraud, information leaks, malware, ransomware, phishing, and social engineering, different organizations across the globe are investing in cybersecurity. In the near future, new protection ways will emerge involving hashing protocols, machine learning algorithms for fraud detection, blockchain-based solutions.

10. 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. 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 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.

Conclusion

The technological world is rapidly developing, changing the way we live and work. Mobile and web apps, IoT platforms, AI-enabled programs, 5G, blockchain-based systems, and many other tech products are being adopted to solve different business challenges.

Offering many benefits, they also help companies meet industrial-specific needs and reduce costs. In the coming years, we’ll see the fast adoption of various innovative technologies.

If you have questions about this topic or want to discuss some issues, feel free to contact Arateg team. Having extensive experience in cutting-edge software development, we’ll be glad to help you.