In the past ten years, we’ve come leaps and bounds when you think about what our devices are now capable of. It only felt like yesterday that we were happy with a phone that could make calls, send texts and allow us to kill time playing the legendary Nokia game Snake. Now we have high-end smartphones that have more computing power than some laptops that are only a few years old. They enable us to keep in touch with our friends, stream our favorite media on the fly and play games with graphics that compete with console titles. It begs the question, how will developers continue to innovate to keep us obsessed with apps?

The Hub For The Internet of Things

You may have heard and read about the interest regarding the Internet of Things and how it will have a significant impact on our lives, but you’d be forgiven for not paying it much attention when it still appears to be some way off. However, Business Insider believes that by 2020, there will be 34 billion devices connected to the internet, up from 10 billion in 2015. This significant increase is of a result of the development of household appliances with wifi capabilities, and how will you control these devices? With your smart phone. Very soon you will be able to wake up and use your phone or tablet to turn on your lights, TV, turn up the heating and boil the kettle for your morning coffee, all without leaving your bed. The Internet of Things will allow you to create a completely connected home and the apps on your phone will be the centerpiece.

Apps will get incredibly faster

To get a good idea of how technology will shape our lives in the future, we need only look at what the companies that have completely turned the industry on it’s head the the recent past, Facebook and Google. In 2015 Facebook introduced a feature called Instant Articles, allowing certain websites that support the feature to allow their readers to access the content literally the moment they touched the link. Google also have dedicated a lot of time and effort into developing their Accelerated Mobile Pages technology to increase loading speeds and improve the user experience when browsing. Google are so committed to improving load times that it is a significant factor in SEO rankings. Even the most popular websites will struggle to rank well in Google search if they’re hosted on slow servers. With the 5G network currently in testing, we can expect apps and websites to respond instantly in coming years.

The cloud will continue to make our data accessible from anywhere

Cloud storage and functionality has soared in popularity in recent years and it will play an integral role in how we store our data and access software in years to come. Year on year, manufacturers release more sophisticated smartphones with significant processing power and better cameras. Unless you’re willing to pay the extra money, filming in 4K will very soon use up all of your data and you’ll need to find other methods of saving your precious memories. Apple have invested heavily in establishing their iCloud service, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud service now makes up a large part of their business and Google offer a whole host of services that run off their cloud network. Eventually will come a time when we very store very little data on our devices other than the operating system, enabling us to access our information, files and apps from any device anywhere in the world. The main concern with this trend is the security and issues Apple have experience with iCloud hacks in the past will do nothing to calm fears in this regard. However, it certainly looks like the cloud will be hanging over our heads for the foreseeable future.