Our mobile world contains a swirling mass of mobile apps, downloadable in an instant, but with almost no published information on their actual use or ability to play nicely with others. It’s time we grew past the awe of “the new app” and become much more discriminating about the use of the memory and application storage of our smartphones and tablets.
In reality, most people, businesses and organizations use multiple mobile applications to perform their daily duties. Apps come from widely varying sources and have capabilities, features and functions that are wasted, incompatible or insufficient, necessitating loading yet another app.
Thus, the coming Next Big Thing will be App Integration. Oh, yes, another term with the initials, “AI”. How many is that now? Artifical Intelligence, Angle of Incidence, Artificial Insemination, 4or 5 others – I don’t know.
Writers of quality applications for mobile devices are beginning cautiously to talk to each other. They are reaching out to each other in hopes of improving their own brand, their own value through being integrable (not integrate-able) with other applications that have a companion nature. This is because producing an app that can work well with another app means your app will be installed and used more often, increasing your value and income.
App writers are looking for common development tools and platforms that will result in easier integration in the future with these companion applications to advance that integrability, further increasing their products attractiveness to a wider range of app users and integrators.
This means that application integration aimed at smartphone and tablet applications is a new frontier in this untamed mobile world. You may not notice at first those applications that are merging or integrating, but there will, in the not-too-distant future be more and more obvious touting of integrability and paths to integration by app writers. This will benefit everyone as the talents and specialties of app writers are joined with other app writers with different but coherent skills.
Already smartphones have become the integration of physical hardware pieces, such as phone, computer, camera, TV, connectivity center and more. So, integration of the application of all that hardware capability is a logical next thrust. Also, watch as Android and Apple apps begin to become integrable, too. Appligration. Oh, what a brave new world.
