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Learn how a no-code platform facilitates the development of a marketplace business.
Read moreWhile the biggest benefit of using no-code to build your shopping platform is simply quickly turning your marketplace idea into a workable product, there are several other benefits to building online marketplace apps using no-code tools:
No-code tools can significantly reduce the costs associated with building and launching a marketplace. They decrease the need for custom development, allowing you to build and launch your marketplace at a fraction of the cost.
A marketplace website builder for no-code development allows you to build and launch your marketplace much faster than traditional coding methods. This can be particularly beneficial if you have a short-term focus or need to get your product to market quickly.
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No-code builders have a low learning curve, making them accessible to non-technical founders and individuals. This can be particularly appealing for those who are new to building digital products or have limited technical skills.
No-code development platforms are designed to be user-friendly, with a range of templates, custom elements, and integrations to help you build a functional and professional marketplace.
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Here’s a rundown of the most valuable metrics to track in a marketplace app.
Read moreUsage metrics tell you what users do in your application. Mobile analytics help you track the visited screens, the used features, and the amount of time users spend on each screen. These metrics will help you understand how users are using the product.
Usage metrics include:
This measures the number of unique users who have used the app within a given time, e.g., daily or monthly active users.
The average amount of time that users spend using the app during a single session. This metric is especially useful when you combine it with other metrics such as screen views, transactions, or interactions in the app.
You can track the number of times a specific screen is viewed by users. This can help you understand which screens are the most popular and which ones may not be receiving as much attention. This way you can introduce changes in the screens (or even eliminate them to streamline the user experience).
This measures the average number of times that a user opens the app over a specific period.
Drop off rate within a specific step in the funnel can help you eliminate the friction points that decrease conversion rates.
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Flutter is an effective way to manage one team that works on a single code base of a product that runs on many devices and platforms.
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No-code tools help validate ideas and launch products quickly. Here’s an overview of no-code startups and companies that started without code.
Read moreLaunched in 2016 by three roommates, Comet is probably the most successful no-code startup out there. Comet is a freelancing marketplace that attributes its early success to no-code platforms.
Being a non-technical founder, Charles Thomas built and launched the core platform quickly. Built entirely in Bubble.io, Comet scaled fast, helping freelancers deliver 300+ projects and register an average MRR of $800k.
Comet's early success is attributed to the founder’s manually vetting every freelancer profile.
The platform attracted venture capital upward of €14 million within three years of inception. Investors like Kima and Otium Ventures gave seed capital. Over the last five years, Comet helped 1000+ companies hire tech talent.
Founded by David Fano, Teal helps people get better outcomes from a job search. The platform lets people organize their job hunt activities and find better jobs.
Teal's founder admits that no-code was in their DNA from the beginning. They used Bubble to launch the platform.
Choosing a no-code platform gave Teal better control over design and helped it iterate faster. Teal started with Bubble for the main product, then used Typeform for surveys and Airtable for database management — connecting everything using Zapier. Webflow was used for the website.
The founder says that traditional mockups are a great solution, but they don't help validate if there’s demand for a product. A no-code MVP lets companies speed up development, test rapidly, and iterate quickly to find a product-market fit.
Teal has raised over $11 million from investors and continues to improve the platform with a small team. No-code helped the company refine the product and focus on better helping people achieve the most out of their career journey.
Good content can drive demand galore to a business. Scribly helps companies with content needs through a service facilitated by a no-code website.
Started by Dani Bell, a British freelancer, Scribly was built entirely using no-code tools. Interestingly, Scribly started out because of her need to productize her content marketing services.
Scribly was built in 6-8 weeks and registered an MRR of $30K within a year.
When asked about her journey, the founder stated that she was amazed at how quickly and affordably one can build something using no-code technologies. She also revealed that she didn't want a no-code business but was looking to patch some solutions to improve her productivity.
Scribly's success with no-code stems from the founder's understanding of the market's pain points. A clear goal is essential to building a useful solution. Indeed, no-code startups that are successful first focus on the problem and then try to solve it with technology.
Dani Bell used Webflow for the website, Airtable for database management, and Zapier to connect different systems. The workflow is pretty simple but highly effective.
Qoins help people pay their debt faster. The company provides financial coaching, tips, and round-off payments for automating debt repayment using a mobile app.
Qoins app was built in Bubble. According to the founders, Bubble let them build a seamless product quickly that would otherwise need a big team to launch and maintain.
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Over the last four years, Qoins has helped people pay over $30 million in debt. They also won the Fintech Innovation Award Challenge — the biggest award for fintech companies in the United States. The company has raised a total of $2.3 million since it started.
Flexiple is a popular Toptal alternative that helps companies hire pre-vetted freelancers. Flexiple generates $3 million in revenue, and the company is built using a no-code stack that costs them just $60 per month.
In a theoretically competitive space of freelance hiring platforms, the key to success was a simple business model, core focus on organic growth, and frugal innovation.
It took Flexiple four years to reach $1 million in annual revenue, during which they tested various models. Since then, Flexiple’s been growing at 25% month-on-month.
Flexiple’s no-code tech stack is Unicorn Platform, Airtable, Bubble, and Webflow. According to the blog on one of Flexiple’s side projects, Buildd, the company:
Flexiple's founder, Karthik Sridharan, regularly shares nuggets about the power of no-code in building a startup on his Twitter.
Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, fixes broken education systems.
The platform lets students attend college-level programs, learn a new skill, and land a job without paying any upfront tuition fee. Bloom relies on the Income Share Agreement model, where a student can pay back tuition after securing a job.
The ingenious model helped the company raise $4 million in seed funding (and $122 million overall), all for a solution built using a no-code platform. Bloom used Typeform, Airtable, Retool, and Webflow to develop and launch an MVP for 3,000 users.
No-code helped it launch a functional platform without writing code or programming skills. The team at Bloom introduced automation, got their idea off the ground, and caught the attention of investors and students.
Dividend Finance is another no-code success story that has transformed an entire industry. Dividend Finance helps homeowners secure financing for home improvements and add renewable energy solutions to their homes.
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Dividend Finance provides a simple onboarding experience for loan applications that removes obstacles and red-tapism, especially for individual customers.
The platform used Bubble to launch the no-code MVP and managed to process more than $1 billion in sales over the years. Dividend Finance attracted investments of over $384 million from Credit Suisse and LL funds, and also the company won several awards in the fintech industry.
If you are looking to build a directory app using no-code, LetterHunt can be a great inspiration. LetterHunt helps marketers, readers, and founders discover niche newsletters. Built using Softr, LetterHunt hosts information about 10,000+ newsletters across 20+ categories.
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LetterHunt received a great response from the online community and became the #1 Product of the Day and Week on ProductHunt.
Princeton Concession is a limited-area food delivery app lets users order refreshments and snacks at Princeton Stadium, New Jersey. The app, built using Glide, helps avoid long wait times and queues at food stalls in the stadium.
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Crowd management is a serious issue at concerts and sporting events. A food delivery app built on a simple no-code architecture for a limited geographical area is a great solution to modernize the food ordering experience.
Chara is a holistic health and wellness company that helps achieve a balance between mind, body, and soul. The Chara app that lets you book sessions with expert therapists, health coaches, and alternative health specialists.
Built by Dylan Terrill using Adalo, the app connects you to top-rated practitioners for sleep, skin, gut health, mental health, nutrition, and general health issues. You can use the app to book a physical session or video chat with an expert.
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The user-friendly interface and minimalist design crafted using a no-code app builder help users find answers to their healthcare issues faster.
Aqarat is a real-estate listing app designed for the Middle East and African markets. Available in English and Arabic, the mobile app was built using Adalo.
The app helps users find residential and commercial properties for sale or rent in a region. With features like location filter, search, and customizable listing, the mobile app is great for people looking for a property to buy, sell, or rent.
According to the maker, no-code eased the development process and helped quickly launch the MVP.
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Launching an MVP is an efficient way to ease a product into the market to gauge feedback. You can build a no-code MVP in days instead of weeks.
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Flutter is one of the most popular cross-platform frameworks, but there’s a limited pool of experienced developers. Learn how to hire the right developers.
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How can technologies such as Flutter help maintain an optimal ratio of business viability to customer satisfaction?
Read moreAt nomtek, we believe that the key to building successful digital products is to take an honest approach to development. This means we don't just push a product out the door without carefully considering whether it’s truly needed by the target audience.
Instead, we experiment, validate, and discuss market changes to ensure that the product will solve a real problem for the target audience. This allows us to create products that are useful and effective, with a strong appeal to the people who will be using them.
Teresa Torres' Continuous Discovery Habits is a framework that can help businesses explore product opportunities and validate their ideas. The framework treats product development as an ongoing process, where businesses should be constantly experimenting, learning, and adapting in order to create successful products.
The Continuous Discovery Habits framework consists of six key habits:
By following these habits, businesses can use the continuous discovery framework to explore product opportunities and validate ideas in a systematic and effective way.
Ongoing discovery habits yield the best insights in cross-functional teams. Teresa Torres proposes a product trio consisting of a designer, developer, and product manager. Each contributes their expertise, filling gaps and generating compounding discovery benefits.
Network effects are a powerful tool that can be used to build products that resonate with users. Network effects leverage relationships between users, allowing new users to benefit from the network that already exists. By creating network effects within an app, as it grows in popularity, each user gains more value as more relationships are formed and connected. This trend has become increasingly important for businesses and developers looking to create engaging and successful digital products over the last few years.
The key to reaping benefits from network effects is building products customers want — for this to happen, ongoing discovery and an almost intimate knowledge of customer needs are necessary.
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To fully leverage the power of cross-platform Flutter development services, the key is to approach the project in a structured yet agile way.
Read moreWhile the product development cadence for Flutter is similar to that of other cross-platform mobile frameworks, Flutter’s flexibility lets developers improve efficiency during all stages of product creation. The code can be reused across platforms to make development and maintenance easier.
A product strategy helps ensure that the mobile app meets customer needs and is viable in the market. The validation process includes market research, user feedback, and competitor analysis. The results of the validation process will guide the development process. If the product should be available to audiences on different platforms and devices, picking Flutter as the frontend technology will help lower development costs: You can build Flutter apps for mobile, web, and desktop.
Product design workshops let the team collaborate and discuss product requirements, user experience, and design elements. Workshops help ensure that the product’s UX and UI resonate with target audiences and meet the goals of the project.
During this exploratory part of the project, the team brainstorms to create people-centered designs. The team creates a roadmap for the product and discusses any potential problems that may arise. The workshops also help align stakeholders on the product vision.
Flutter lets developers create truly stunning digital products. The SDK has a set of customizable widgets and built-in animation support, which make it easy to create beautiful, fast, and responsive user interfaces. Flutter also has a hot reload feature that lets developers see the changes they make to their code in real time, which speeds up developments. A built-in robust testing framework for writing and running unit and integration tests improves the QA process.
But to develop great user experiences in Flutter across all platforms (iOS, Android, and desktop) the Flutter app development company should have native app development skills. This way, the app will have a familiar feel. Each mobile platform (be it iOS or Android) has its own unique set of characteristics and requirements, and using native development techniques ensures that an app will be able to take advantage of the full capabilities of the platform. Experience in developing native apps is crucial.
Skilled product managers navigate the product backlog through the availability of resources to meet the deadline and budget requirements. Flutter helps product managers communicate better because there’s only one team for the whole product regardless of the platform.
Fewer meetings mean more time for quality development work and the discovery of opportunities.
The quality assurance process for Flutter development is similar to that of other mobile app development frameworks. It involves testing the app to ensure that it is functional, reliable, and user-friendly. Testing for performance, usability, or UX lets developers identify any issues and make improvements before the app is released.
Support and maintenance services are essential for ensuring the success of a product. Ongoing support and maintenance ensure the product continues to function properly and provides a good user experience.
When providing app maintenance services, it's important to consider the following:
Flutter can make it easier to manage a team and ship features compared to native app development and many other cross-platform app development technologies. It’s a cost-effective long-term strategy for products intended to be maintained for years. Still, keep in mind that migration is a big endeavor, so before deciding to migrate to Flutter, consider the following:
Upgrading an app to the latest version of Flutter can provide many benefits, including enhanced business continuity, security upgrades, and improved performance. New Flutter releases also come with new features and improvements. To ensure the upgrade doesn’t cause regression or generate bugs, a team should review the app's code to check for potential compatibility issues.
Flutter product consultants help businesses determine how this cross-platform technology can support business objectives. Working closely with experts, businesses can improve their time-to-market, customer engagement, and business outcomes. With a customized approach to development, product consultants analyze data and conduct experiments to help companies get the most out of their investment in Flutter-based digital products and find opportunities within the target audience’s needs.
Architecture refers to the overall design and structure of a mobile application. It includes the high-level components and modules of the app, as well as the relationships and interactions between those components. A well-designed architecture is important for several reasons:
Understanding Flutter’s architecture is another element that helps build the mobile apps architecture with best practices in mind.
Continuous integration (CI) is a mobile application development practice where Flutter app developers regularly integrate their code changes into a shared code repository. Automated tools build, test, and validate the changes. Using continuous integration in mobile app development can provide several benefits, including:
Learn why Flutter is a good choice for cross-platform apps that run on mobile, desktop, and web.
Read moreBeing a Google product, Flutter is the staple technology behind many of the company’s products: Google Pay, Stadia, and Ads. But the list of companies who trusted Flutter with mobile app development is much larger, encompassing brands such as Alibaba Group, eBay, Toyota, BMW, iRobot, and Tencent.
Want more examples? Here’s our list of 15 brands that trusted Flutter with their software needs.
Discover highly popular and successful mobile apps built with Flutter. Learn how Flutter's robust functionalities have contributed to their success.
Read moreWith every major release, the number of Flutter apps increases. When Flutter 2 was released in March 2021, there were over 150,000 Flutter-based apps on Play Store alone. At the time of Flutter 3 launch in May 2022, we had 500,000 Flutter apps already out there. That's a 455% jump in usage over two years.
By comparison, in August 2020, there were “only” 90,000 Flutter-made apps.
Here’s Flutter’s evolution with key improvements to the framework:
Xianyu by Alibaba is an ecommerce app for buying and selling second-hand goods. The app is built in Flutter and is available on both iOS and Android.
In 2017, the team at Xianyu conducted an in-depth comparison between available cross-platform development platforms. The analysis favored Flutter, which offered a better development experience and faster testing capabilities compared to, for example, React Native.
At the time, Xianyou was struggling with hiring challenges and the shortage of talented iOS engineers, which hindered the company’s app development efforts. Flutter helped the team solve their recruitment problems. With Flutter, the company could adopt a flexible team structure. Also, apps built with Flutter performed better according to Xianyu’s internal test results.
Easy implementation, minimal learning curve, and hot reload feature helped Xianyu launch new product pages quickly. After initial success, Flutter became a standard part of Xianyu’s tech stack, speeding up development and improving the cross-platform experience for end-users.
The Xianyu app now has more than 50 million downloads and 10 million active daily users.
More about Flutter and Xianyu by Alibaba
Google Stadia is a cloud-based video game streaming service that lets you stream games on a smartphone, PC, laptop, or tablet. What made this app so popular among gamers?
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In 2019, John McDole, the leading UI engineer at Google Stadia, said they used Flutter to build the Stadia mobile app. According to their blog post, the Stadia controller setup was one of the most complicated parts of the mobile app. But Flutter made writing and maintaining Stadia's controller setup a more manageable task.
According to the official blog, Flutter was instrumental in speeding up the development of the controller setup flow. Writing code in Flutter was faster and almost doubled the team’s productivity. Flutter also helped maintain cross-platform consistency for Google Stadia.
Google Stadia used the available custom Bluetooth plugin logic, which reduced the quantity of code to be written. The team was able to deploy features quickly across iOS and Android versions. Flutter’s shared codebase and hot reload capabilities increased the speed of development. Also, automated testing using Flutter was fast and reliable.
eBay’s automobile portal eBay Motors, is one of the most popular apps built with Flutter. The app lets you buy and sell vehicles and accessories, discover new listings, and connect with car buyers and sellers.
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Hot reload and automated testing allowed them to test functional prototypes quickly. The development experience was seamless, and apps delivered a consistent user experience.
Flutter’s code-sharing capabilities sped up the platform-specific integration deployment process. The team used available Flutter plugins to integrate device APIs quickly.
According to the team, Flutter’s capabilities (shared code, hot reload, and “write-once use forever” philosophy) let the team deliver new features in record time.
More on eBay Motors and Flutter
Google Ads is one of Google’s flagship products, and its mobile app is a great extension of the desktop version. Google Ads mobile lets ad managers track and control their campaigns on the go.
As the creator of Flutter, Google actively uses the framework to build its own products. Google Ads mobile has just the right ratio of desktop features to satisfy the needs of millions of users across the world. The app is fast and responsive, rendering graphics quickly for an optimal user experience.
Google also chose Flutter to tap into convenient scaling options and reduce the need to maintain two codebases for iOS and Android.
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The New York Times used Flutter to create a cross-platform app for their readers. Read by millions every day, NYT was looking for new ways to engage their readers and improve the user experience.
Flutter’s cross-platform capabilities helped NYT launch a platform-independent app — the popular KenKen puzzle.
Offering a seamless experience across platforms is always a challenge for developers. Flutter’s single codebase allowed the team to launch KenKen Puzzles for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and the web, simultaneously.
Flutter facilitated real-time iteration and saved time on building and running multiple betas. This let the NYT team launch a seamless version of KenKen puzzles across platforms quickly.
The app became the first commercial Flutter web prototype to debut at Google I/O 2019.
The Hamilton app is great for all fans of the musical. By giving users additional ways to interact with favorite characters, Hamilton keeps engagement at a high level, ensuring fans stay active long after shows.
The Hamilton team built the app in three months with Flutter. Flutter made it possible to release the app for iOS and Flutter with eye-pleasing designs and fast performance. The team considered other frameworks such as React Native or Xamarin but both lacked the tools available in Flutter.
MyBMW app lets BMW owners interact with the car — lock, unlock, locate, monitor, and navigate using their mobile device. The app serves as a single-point solution for managing car ownership with good user experience.
My BMW app was primarily built for iOS for different vehicle models and variants. Though it had an Android version, feature discrepancy was a major challenge for BMW. BMW ownership experience was inconsistent for iOS and Android users affecting the brand image.
The company had two fundamental goals to tackle the “platform disparity” problem:
Flutter helped them tackle both challenges. BMW had several car models and brands under its umbrella, each requiring a dedicated app.
With Flutter, the BMW team launched the new MyBMW app to deliver a cohesive and seamless ownership experience. An internal platform powered automated builds and testing of unique app versions for different platforms, markets, and sub-brands. This saved BMW thousands of hours every month.
Thanks to Flutter, BMW deployed more than 10000 versions of 96 different variants of the My BMW app in record time. Plus, the problem of managing multiple code bases was resolved after migrating to Flutter
MyBMW App offered a consistent user experience across iOS and Android for all models. This improved app reliability and preserved the brand’s image in the eyes of the customers.
Topline is a music production app for artists to save their music ideas. Artists can record tracks, add lyrics, compose creations, anywhere, anytime. The app saves everything on the cloud, so artists are never worried about losing their record-breaking beat.
The app was launched by Abbey Road Studios for iOS, originally. The ideas' novelty and utility made the app an instant hit. Though an Android version was not planned initially, persistent demand made the developers look for options.
Building a music production app on Android is trickier than iOS due to audio latency issues. Limited resources and a small team added to their problems.
Choosing Flutter for cross-platform development made sense to the Topline team as they could launch both Android and iOS versions with a single codebase.
According to the Topline dev team, Flutter helped them quickly build, launch, and deploy without much hassle. The team added a neat swipe menu and launched Android and iOS versions in just 10 weeks — a seemingly impossible ordeal if they’d developed natively. The app became immensely popular and was officially featured on Google I/O 2018 and Flutter Live 2018. In 2018, Topline also won the Top UK App Award.
Reflectly supports mental health by encouraging users to write daily entries as a vent to nagging feelings or thoughts. The app uses AI to give personalized insights and ask users specific questions to help them dig deeper into the entries. Reflectly is more than a journal app and mood tracker — overtime it creates graphs with feelings analysis and sends personalized quotes to inspire users.
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Reflectly was built in 2017 using React Native. The team had big expectations, which React Native didn’t meet. The animations were sluggish and the cross-platform development experience was subpar. In 2018, the team decided to try Flutter. Initial experiments delighted the team and Reflectly migrated to Flutter.
Based in Santa Clara, California, Realtor.com is a popular real estate company and the second most visited real estate listings website in 2021. Until mid-2019, their organizational model had two separate Android and iOS development teams and codebases, which became an overhead later. After recognizing the benefits of having a single codebase, the company started implementing new features using Flutter’s Add to App feature.
Adding Flutter to the existing mobile apps brought many benefits. For example, it freed their web developers from having to learn two new languages and frameworks. Moreover, the ability to develop features for both iOS and Android at once increased their productivity. Feature release and code changes now require only half developers than earlier.
Sonos lets you listen to music from popular streaming services like Spotify, Gaana, or Apple Music on any speaker. People use the free Sonos app on their mobile, tablet, PC, or laptop to connect their home speakers to streaming services.
Sonos started using Flutter in 2020 for their app development endeavors. Their existing app had several issues, including a confusing (and buggy) speaker setup wizard.
Flutter increased the development capabilities of the Sonos team. The framework saved hundreds of hours and helped launch a refreshed and intuitive cross-platform app quickly.
They solved all existing issues and developed additional features that improved the user experience. Sonos revamped the UI and offered assistive features for end-users across all platforms. Integration of sound, animations, transitions, and walkthroughs was easy with Flutter.
The new features and UX solved the problems and delighted the app’s existing and growing user base.
Catering to 48+ million people around the globe, Nubank is one of the largest independent digital banks on the planet. The app improves access to banking by reducing complexity in underserved markets.
As the company grew, it couldn’t find enough native mobile developers to roll out new features. The lack of quality talent led to disparities between features on different platforms.
After carefully evaluating options for seamless development across platforms, they chose Flutter. Flutter outperformed all platforms in terms of development experience, documentation, or stability.
Choosing Flutter, Nubank hired local talent easily and onboarded them into the dev team within days instead of weeks. With Flutter, the team could launch new features simultaneously across platforms.
The hot reload feature and an internal developer tool built using Flutter helped speed up testing capabilities. According to Reinaldo Moreira, Nubank’s mobile engineer, Flutter enabled them to launch life insurance solutions within just three months which would have taken at least a year.
Flutter brought consistency to their product development efforts. It also improved their build time (from overall 70.45 minutes to just 9.9 minutes) and increased the team’s performance. Also, a single codebase made it easier to manage bugs, monitor the app, and correlate app metrics with other systems.
Beike supports people in finding their dream home and enjoying a great virtual house hunting experience in China. Beike lists 187 million properties in China and offers virtual property tours via a mobile app.
The company wanted a seamless app experience for its diverse user base. They aimed for a beautiful design with near-native performance on iOS and Android.
With Flutter, the company increased developer efficiency by up to 100%. Thanks to a single codebase, they could build essential features for iOS and Android simultaneously. Fast development shortened launch to a month.
According to the Beike dev team, Flutter let them scale without hiring a large team. Relying on the Flutter community, the team saved a lot of time thanks to several plugins, widgets, and solutions that sped up the development.
Today, the company has more than a dozen apps operating under the Beike umbrella. Together, the apps have helped 300 million families find and visualize their dream home.
Betterment is an online investing company that provides investment and financial advice. The Betterment team needed a solution that would help them better manage their mobile codebase. With Flutter’s add-to-app feature, Betterment connected the new code to its native codebase without impacting the customer experience.
Today Betterment has over 500,000 user accounts and 26 billion assets under management.
Google Pay is one of the world’s most popular digital payments apps with more than 100 million users across the globe. The app allows users to pay for goods and services and adopt digital payments in some of the remotest corners of the world.
Every region or country expansion required its own set of unique features. An increasing user base on iOS and Android led to a wastage of development resources due to the duplication of efforts for every feature. Also, finding and hiring more engineers was a constant challenge, too. Choosing Flutter for development made natural sense.
Flutter helped Google Pay consolidate engineering resources and save on building dedicated teams. With a team of 150 engineers, the team could rewrite and test the existing app with 300+ features. Google Pay, built on Flutter, was launched to 100 million monthly active users in the US and Indian markets.
Thanks to Flutter, Google launched a slick, beautiful, and efficient app, with a 35% smaller codebase. According to Google, they were able to save 60-70% on development time due to a single codebase.
Rapid MVP development in Flutter lets you validate your idea quickly while minimizing development time and costs.
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Check how your business can use augmented reality to improve customer experience, increase engagement, and boost brand promotion.
Read moreWith relatively cheap implementation costs and easy accessibility, mobile AR is a great choice for a goal-oriented tech asset. Businesses can use augmented reality to increase customer engagement, improve brand promotion and awareness, and facilitate the creation of product demos.
Multiple high-profile companies are investing in AR tech. Among them are Qualcomm, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The two smartphone giants, Apple and Google, are particularly invested into developing their respective AR software development kits (SDK).
Update July 2022: There are almost 3.5 billion AR-enabled devices of any type, with 891 million Android smartphones and 1.25 billion iOS phones. However, the number of active users of AR is significantly lower. The potential for commercial adoption of this tech is still untapped
The AR market alone is blooming, with various forecasts projecting it to reach between 30 to 80 billion USD in the upcoming years (1, 2, 3).
No mainstream implementation of costly technology necessary to bring it to the users makes augmented reality that much more accessible. On the other hand, virtual reality or mixed reality headsets are still too expensive for such widespread adoption.
But what is all the fuss about? Can AR apps transform businesses and add tangible value? Check out how augmented reality is helping businesses.
Before jumping into the world of augmented reality tech, there are a few questions you have to answer.
If you want to include AR in your business strategy, first ask yourself what it is specifically that you want to achieve through an AR solution.
To give you an example: a problem can be something missing in the workflow.
Let’s say quality assurance at your company takes a lot of time to complete. The reason why might be that QA professionals need to comb through stacks of paper instructions to complete the process.
This inefficient approach results in a waste of time: seconds turn into minutes and minutes into hours. In the long term, it amounts to a significant drop in productivity.
Augmented reality could come in handy here by feeding all the steps and actions necessary to conduct a QA test into a mixed reality headset. The application would interact with and respond to the actions of the tester in real-time.
Here’s Renault’s road to quality assurance supported by mixed reality:
Wondering what companies use augmented reality? Let’s look at some of the use cases of augmented reality across industries and sectors.
The manufacturing sector is expected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of cross-reality solutions. Combined with the rollout of 5G connectivity that offers speeds 100x faster than 4G LTE, augmented reality can be a huge opportunity for manufacturing facilities to improve a number of their processes and workflows.
The upside of using AR in manufacturing facilities is that it’s a fraction of the cost compared to investing in complex hardware.
Besides, augmented reality is much more convenient to exchange information since there are no physical restrictions such as cables, devices. Data is fed to the AR application virtually.
Onboarding. With AR, employees just starting out in a manufacturing plant could see interactive hints and instructions on how to use machinery, with all important information layered over the physical equipment. AR onboarding can increase employee safety and shave off ramp-up time.
See an example of using AR for training purposes at BMW:
Productivity. AR headsets equipped with AI technology could help employees get from point A to point B in the most efficient fashion, leading to potential productivity gains in the long term. Moreover, engineers could send a request for a specific part by simply pointing at it.
Operational information. With AR elements overlaid in a factory, manufacturing employees could have easy access to information about the performance of existing equipment and infrastructure. For example, interactive gauges over different areas on the assembly line offer real-time insight for employees.
Safety. Mixed reality solutions can inform employees about dangers (e.g., areas closed for maintenance/cleaning). And when an emergency happens, workers in need of help or assistance could transmit an interactive beam with their whereabouts.
Relying on complex technology and hardware, cars are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain for mechanics, who may not yet have the know-how necessary for servicing. The pace of the digital evolution in the automotive industry calls for improvements in various workflows and processes.
Remote assistance. AR-based remote assist lets engineers show other employees how to conduct complex repairs and service maintenance on vehicles.
Mercedes-Benz US is using Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to help technicians perform maintenance activities remotely with the assistance of an expert engineer.
Training. Cross-reality workshops are a safe and efficient way to share information. Engineers can enroll in digital training where they learn the workings of complex machinery and how to assemble various parts. Instructors show trainees how to disassemble an engine without actually putting it apart.
Porsche says it has tripled the usage of augmented reality in their workshops. “Tech Live Look” is Porsche’s in-house app for connecting technicians with experts to help solve complex car repairs. Porsche has been using augmented reality for years.
Tech Live Look speeds up car service per vehicle by up to 40%, significantly improving Porsche’s customer experience.
See how augmented reality can be used in education.
Prototyping. Every new iteration of a prototype can be costly for an automotive company. Car prototypes can cost upwards of $100,000. Immersive designs aid in iterating and improving on product designs without companies having to spend anything on expensive prototypes.
Now, $100,000 might not seem like a lot for big automotive companies, but when we’re talking about multiple iterations, it can amount to a nice sum.
BMW is already using AR in vehicle prototyping. AR lets workers know faster if a component will fit once the production starts. Using AR in that way decreases the need for performing many test setups.
Content consumption. Enhanced with augmented reality, written content can be expanded to include immersive experiences. AR can also serve as a visual aid in non-fiction writing to better illustrate concepts and events.
Board games. Traditional board games could use augmented reality to enhance the level of immersion for gamers. Physical boards can be transformed from 2D experiences into interactive 3D adventures — the board stays the same while the elements turn virtual.
In the military, soldiers can use augmented reality that transforms sensor data into visual input to gain greater insight into their surroundings as well as to improve navigation.
Situational awareness. Sensors and cameras implemented in AR tech provide soldiers with more information regarding their surroundings. Other critical information can also be fed into a headset from headquarters.
Since 2018, the US Army has been looking into AR when developing the Integrated Virtual Augmentation System (IVAS). The IVAS provides mission-critical information to soldiers on the battlefield, for example, the system performs a quick object identification check.
Navigation. In aviation, augmented reality blends complex charts and maps into a pilot’s field of view, decreasing the need to check the information on displays.
The US Army is exploring the possibilities of augmented reality goggles for combat dogs. The idea is to give dogs in the field more contextual information, along with visual indicators that tell dogs where to go.
Ordinarily, soldiers guide their dogs with lasers or hand gestures. During a mission, however, it might not be possible for the soldier to be close enough to the dog to give it commands. This is where AR goggles step in, letting soldiers guide their dogs through visual cues rendered in the glasses. Additionally, the goggles attached to the dog’s head transmit what the dog sees back to the soldier.
Tenant instructions. Landlords renting apartments can use augmented reality to provide tenants with instructions. For example, to help tenants orient themselves around the apartment or explain how to use and locate different utilities.
Along with smart locks that eliminate the need for the landlord to hand the tenant the keys, augmented reality further decreases the necessity for contact.
Tenants simply put on a headset or turn on an app and explore the flat themselves with detailed instructions.
Immersive experiences. To advertise offered destinations and facilities, travel agencies can turn to augmented reality to create AR tour presentations. This way, customers get to experience interactive content and learn more about a destination. AR tour presentations also help travel agencies prepare offers with content customized to cater to different target audiences.
Moreover, to improve customer experience, travel agencies can equip their customers with advanced digital tour guides. These augmented reality guides can be further tweaked to include memorable and personalized experiences to tourists in a given location. For example, an AR guide could contain sightseeing places that match customer needs and preferences.
Learn what NFC tags are and how they are used beyond contactless payments.
Read moreNear-field communication technology allows two devices to communicate wirelessly. The technology can be embedded in a small tag to facilitate data transfer between nearby mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and other electronics. NFC tags are often compared to RFID, but the two are different.
The RIFD technology (radio-frequency identification) is the predecessor of NFC. RFID tags are most commonly known from anti-theft systems attached to the more expensive products in stores. RIFD has been successfuly used to track inventory in a variety of sectors and industries, e.g., manufacturing, healthcare, automotive, or apparel — wherever there's a need to track items.
NFC is part RFID (radio-frequency identification) and part Bluetooth. Unlike RFID, NFC tags work in close proximity, giving users more precision. NFC also doesn’t require manual device discovery and synchronization as Bluetooth Low Energy does. The biggest difference between RFID and NFC is the communication method.
RFID tags have only a one-way communication method, meaning an RFID-enabled item sends a signal to an RFID reader.
NFC devices have a one- and two-way communication capability, which gives the NFC technology an upper hand in use cases where transactions are dependent on data from two devices (e.g., card payments). Mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, and other contactless payment solutions are all powered by the NFC technology.
So in essence, RFID tags are great for inventory tracking and NFC tags work well for enhanced communication.
NFC has been on the technology scene for years — Nokia launched the first NFC-enabled phone in 2006. But this technology only gained momentum in recent years.
NFC popularity soared when companies recognized NFC as a enabler of a contactless future.
Contactless payments registered a 150% increase between March 2019 and June 2020 in the US alone, partially caused by the pandemic. Contactless tech, originally designed to handle small purchases, is now one of the most popular mobile payment methods.
Today, there are more than 2 billion NFC-enabled devices and 20% of the world’s population has access to NFC.
But what is an NFC tag? How does NFC work? What are the advantages of using NFC? Are NFC payments secure? How are businesses using NFC technology?
Let’s look at all these questions and explore some common applications for NFC tech.
Flutter and React Native are two leading tools for cross-platform mobile development. Learn about their differences and the best use cases for each.
Read moreAs of May 2021, Flutter was getting closer to overtaking React Native in terms of popularity and usage. But let’s look at the stats.
Interestingly, in 2019, Flutter was almost at the bottom of the popularity contest. So the technology is catching up quite nimbly.
UPDATE, June 2022:
Submissions for the Stack Overflow Survey 2022 have closed for this year so we can soon expect an update of the Flutter vs. React Native debate among developers using these technologies in commercial projects and beyond.
A look at Google Trends results reveals a fierce battle between the two.
After gaining on React Native for over two years, in April 2020, Flutter became a more frequently searched query globally and continues to be so in 2022.
And yet, in the US, the battle still goes on and is as fierce as ever, with axes and gunpowder spoiling the air galore, especially when you look at the trend curve starting from January 2021. However, Flutter currently has a slight lead over React Native.
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Statista seemed to confirm the global trend in the Flutter vs. React Native battle in 2020. In the survey made with almost 20,000 respondents, Flutter was going head to head with React Native.
UPDATE, July 2021:
The latest research from Statista places Flutter as the leading cross-platform mobile development framework in 2021. Flutter surpasses React Native by 4% (42% for Flutter against 38% for React Native). Still, it's fair to say the two technologies are almost equally popular.
What makes these two technologies so popular? Let's see.
Explore the trends in mobile technologies in 2022 and what they have to offer for mobile app developers and smartphone users.
Read moreIn 2020 alone, it's estimated there were 218 billion mobile application downloads worldwide. The growing number of app downloads — and a steady demand trend — opens the door for many innovations in the world of mobile technologies.
Here are some of the top mobile app development trends.
A beacon is an inexpensive wireless transmitter that uses Low Energy (BLE) technology to send signals to nearby smart devices.
The beacons are battery-powered and located via Bluetooth — mobile devices can communicate with them even without an internet connection.
For example, Safetify was designed to turn down the volume on mobile devices of people who listen to music while crossing the street, until they safely reach the other side.
The global beacon technology market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 86% from 2017 to 2024. Beacon technology has transformed various industries, primarily retail and e-commerce, and it will play an integral part in increasing customer awareness by delivering location-specific alerts and notifications.
In marketing, using beacon technology is called proximity marketing. Companies such as Macy’s, McDonald’s, Woolworths, or Amazon Go are already using this tech in their on-site marketing efforts and to boost in-store customer experience.
The beacon technology can also be used to create the infrastructure for smart cities.
Enterprise applications operate in a corporate environment, and their primary purpose is to solve complex processes within an organization. Because how well a company performs often depends on these critical software assets, enterprise apps have to be built using reliable and scalable technologies.
Mobile cloud computing enables enterprises to store large amounts of data in one place securely. With the use of cloud services, employees can access this information quickly, which results in enhanced communication and more efficient work.
According to a recent study, the demand for these mobile applications has increased dramatically, and enterprise mobility is a top priority for one-third of organizations.
From default apps like Find My iPhone or Weather to Instagram, Uber, and Yelp, most apps today use geolocation. Many messenger applications let you share your current location directly in the chat. Even photos on your phone camera can be stored by the place they were taken.
Geolocation can be used as a way to deliver more personalized and localized content. Location-based services provide a better user experience, plus they can give companies insight into user demographics.
If you had one in the early 2000s, you were definitely the coolest kid on the block. Although in a different form, It’s no surprise these are making a comeback. Folding phones were among the major announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020.
The emergence of foldable smartphones has created a new challenge for app developers. Dynamic adjustment of app content to fit the screen properly with the right amount of data requires careful planning. Foldables create an entirely new segment for developers to explore, one where plenty of opportunities for disruption await to be explored.
In 2019, global foldable smartphone shipments represented only a tiny fraction of the overall smartphone sales in 2019, but they are projected to increase 100 times by 2025.
The global shift from using cash as your primary form of payment has been happening for years now, and it appears we’re reaching a critical tipping point. Recent global payment reports show that mobile wallet payments are likely to exceed the use of cash in four years.
A wallet in your phone allows you to store all of your credit cards, debit cards, loyalty card information, and more. In addition, mobile apps like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay have revolutionized how we pay for merchandise at the checkout line.
Integrating mobile wallets into apps enables users to checkout quickly and seamlessly, with just a single tap.
The goal of an online retailer is to make their products available to buyers no matter where they are. M-commerce, or mobile commerce, is the buying and selling of goods and services through a mobile device, which helps online retailers reach their customers. M-commerce already accounts for over half of global online retail, which comes as no surprise given that mobile usage and searches are steadily taking over desktop.
Looking at these statistics, we might posit that m-commerce will dominate online retail in the nearest future. This calls for retailers to either optimize their websites to work on mobile devices or release m-commerce apps that offer much more in terms of customer engagement and experience.
In recent years, biometrics has become an increasingly popular form of identification due to its accuracy and reliability. Biometric systems use physical attributes like fingerprints or retinal scans to identify individuals. These are considered safer and more reliable than passwords because they cannot be easily shared or forged.
Biometric technology can be used in financial transactions, government agencies, healthcare facilities, and more. The cost of developing apps that feature this technology has dropped considerably in recent years. Hardware-wise, face recognition and fingerprint scanning have become a staple for many smartphone manufacturers, with Apple being one of the first companies to have implemented Face ID in their phones.
On-demand mobile apps let users order anything from food to laundry service, with just a few taps or swipes. They can be found in different places and formats: as standalone apps like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Postmates; inside other established services like Uber and Amazon Prime Now; or even embedded into social networks like Facebook messenger.
One thing these companies have in common is that they're all gearing up for an increasingly on-demand-driven world where consumers find it easier to find reviews and order a service directly from an app rather than browse through scattered reviews and make phone calls to order services.
The healthcare industry is projected as one of the greatest beneficiaries of augmented reality tech. Learn how AR is already reshaping clinical practice.
Read moreThe potential of AR is visible across industries. From education to manufacturing to automotive, augmented reality fills gaps in workflows, offering tangible opportunities for improvement.
For example, AR can be used to eliminate inefficiencies in manufacturing — the constant loss of focus and time necessary for the engineers to refer to paper instructions amounts to considerable losses over time.
If you've ever struggled with a paper instruction for a shiny new IKEA bookshelf, quality assurance in the automotive industry is like the IKEA situation times 1,782.4.
For extremely precise and complex tasks, the help of computers is invaluable. And the better the augmented reality technology gets, the more advanced its use cases in clinical practice.
In fact, the healthcare industry is projected to add a $47.9 billion boost to the global economy by 2022.
The current clinical practice is evolving at light speed, but the sector still has multiple areas in need of solutions that can benefit from technology.
AR is an entirely new concept to you? Read our AR guide to learn the basics of augmented reality.
Reconstructive surgery calls for a high precision to yield the expected results and improve a patient's recovery time.
Augmented reality goggles can be used to feed information from CT scans and MRI images directly into a surgeon’s field of vision. This way, the surgeon knows where blood vessels and bone fractures are and can increase the precision of the incision during reconstructive surgery.
First, surgeons perform diagnostic imaging on the patient. Then, the data from CT scans, MRI, and X-rays is digitized and transformed into a 3D model, which shows the location of soft tissues, blood vessels, and bones.
This rendering is then fed into the AR device. During the surgery, the 3D rendering is mapped on a patient’s body, providing the surgeon with critical information.
Thanks to this approach, surgeons don’t have to look back and forth between the patient and the images, or rely on audible Doppler ultrasound, which is currently the prevalent method during reconstructive surgeries.
The technology is far from mature, with many challenges waiting in line before mainstream adoption is possible.
For example, transforming information from CT scans and MRI into 3D models is time consuming — the ER won’t benefit from AR, at least for now.
Neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins used augmented reality during spinal fusion surgery on June 8, 2020. Two days later, surgeons relied on an AR headset during the removal of a cancerous tumor from the spine of another patient. Both procedures were conducted using a pilot augmented reality headset from Augmedics.
In 2021, Dr. Harvinder Sandhu at Stamford Health performed a successful spinal surgery using AR goggles. The AR technology uses data from MRIs to overlay critical tissue around a patient's spine. Provided with detailed data projected directly on the retina, the doctor is able to perform more precise surgeries that speed up recovery and decrease the likelihood of infection.
Learn the differences between a proof of concept (POC), prototype, and minimum viable product (MVP) to know how to approach product development.
Read moreIn the world of mobile app development, a POC is a simple project that validates or demonstrates an idea. The purpose of a POC is to check if an idea can be developed and won’t consume excessive resources or time.
With a POC you essentially evaluate core functionality. If your app idea is complex, you can have many POCs to test each functionality.
User experience is pushed aside when you build a POC. That’s because it takes lots of time and work to create an optimal user experience, and that’s not the point of creating a POC. The goal is to validate technical capability.
Catch early investor interest. You can build a POC to present your idea to investors to acquire seed funding for further development.
Innovate. Innovation happens at the intersection of technological viability and market demand. A POC will help you check if your idea can be built using current technology.
Save time. When you check if your idea can be built, you automatically save time that would be wasted if you were to figure out technical viability issues once you hired developers and committed significant resources and time.
Pick the technology. Creating many POCs using different technologies can help you decide which technology stack is the most suitable for your project. This way, you’ll know early on what’s possible as you move forward and how to structure your product’s roadmap.
Check against the competition. If you plan to release a mobile application in a heavily competitive market, a POC will help you validate unique features in your offer. Your product will need to include a unique approach to solving the same problem to be a better alternative to what’s already out there.
PONS XR Interpreter
Companies around the world are increasingly embracing remote-work solutions and collaboration methods. We worked with PONS — a global publishing house and our long-term partner — to create a proof of concept for an XR cross-language communication solution supported by AI.
The POC helped validate if XR Interpreter could be used in a professional environment to make communication easier.
Learn what scalability is in mobile development and how to factor it into product creation.
Read moreIn simple terms, scalability is your application’s ability to handle a growing user base without affecting the user experience and the app’s performance. That means your applications’ infrastructure needs to be able to support a large number of requests per minute (RPMs).
Each user interacting with your application generates a request to your backend — the backend should process that request with a minimum delay. A highly scalable app efficiently manages many requests at once, delivering seamless experiences to users.
Vertical scaling adds more resources like CPU, memory, network capacity, and more to the existing application server. It’s powerful enough to handle a large number of simultaneous requests. However, adding resources can be limited depending on the capabilities of existing servers. Because of that, horizontal scaling is the preferred option in many use cases.
Horizontal scaling or scaling out adds more machines or servers with the application code to increase the capacity. The existing resources of the computing instances do not change, but the application logic may need to change to run in parallel. Popular in distributed systems, a load balancer will handle the incoming requests and distribute the load to multiple machines.
It’s not a requirement to use either horizontal or vertical scaling only. But you can have a hybrid system that includes vertically scaled machines in a horizontally scaled system.
Before jumping straightaway into scaling a mobile app, you first need to ensure you have a viable reason for it. Your scaling expenses need to match the growing user demand in your app to avoid unnecessary costs. Here are the questions you should answer that will help you decide whether the time to improve capacity has come.
By knowing the answers to these questions, you will have a better understanding of where you’re at with capacity and where you need to be to meet the spikes in demand. The information will also help you estimate the budget for scaling your app.
If you already have an application, discover where scalability issues may occur using application monitoring tools like New Relic AMP and AppDynamics. Using the chosen tracking tool, track key metrics like CPU, memory, and network usage. If any of these metrics show high usages, find out the transactions responsible for them. Take these results as a benchmark to find out where and how to inject scalability.
Your mobile app’s tech stack is the key to scalable mobile applications. Thus, choosing the right tech stack with a scalable backend and a responsive front-end technology is a must. If your current tech stack doesn’t leave much room for scalability, consider rewriting your app.
An app rewrite will be a significant investment initially, but when you consider a growing user base of satisfied customers, the ROI will follow soon. For example, consider Wallmarts' decision to transition into its legacy system to Node.js. With that decision, they have been able to gain 98% of growth in mobile conversion.
The application’s infrastructure plays a key role in achieving the desired scalability. Using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like AWS, Azure, or IBM Cloud for your mobile app is a great way to meet a variety of scalability needs. Cloud services have many scaling and pricing options.
For example, if you choose to deploy your app in AWS, the vendor will take care of all the necessary scaling demands on your behalf — many renowned cloud services offer auto-scaling where the app dynamically scales according to the current user demand.
You just have to define the required parameters such as how many maximum servers and other resources like storage, middleware, and networking the service should allocate. In addition, you also have the flexibility to change these parameters according to future app usage statistics. Scaling a mobile application that serves millions of users in a PaaS environment is an easy and flexible approach to scalability.
Caching is another way you can optimize the code for scalability. When you cache the frequently required data, it’s readily available and users can retrieve it faster. Caching helps significantly reduce the processing time.
For example, say your mobile app gets data from an API call. If you save the data in a cache, the next time another user requests the same data, the app won’t need to make that API call again since the data is readily available in the cache.
Caching is a highly useful approach to reducing the amount of data processing when the load is high. When you use caching correctly, it can also make the app work in offline mode.
Your app’s architecture can have a big impact on app scalability. For example:
Client, server, and the application are at different layers where each performs only the most essential tasks. This architecture simplifies each layer, thereby improving scalability and performance.
This architecture helps build flexible applications by making individual services loosely coupled with each other. Individual services of a microservice architecture can be scaled to meet the demand.
If you want to handle a larger number of user requests (e.g., a workload that exceeds the capacity of a single database), you can scale your database horizontally:
Mobile CDNs make content delivery faster because CDNs distribute the information from locations closer to the user. The content is delivered in a shorter time. Mobile CDNs are very useful when your mobile apps’ users are distributed across different regions.
Mobile CDNs are developed specifically to operate on mobile networks and deliver content to mobile devices faster.
Ruby on Rails and Node.js are two popular mobile backend technologies that help developers build reliable and highly available apps.
Read moreRuby on Rails is an open-source and server-side web application development framework based on Ruby and the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. Ruby is famous as an easy-to-learn and beginner-friendly programming language.
There are many methodologies to choose from in software development. Learn the principles of Waterfall, Agile, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup.
Read moreThe Waterfall approach to software development describes a sequential process for building software—i.e., one step has to be completed before the next can begin.
In the Waterfall methodology, the project scope, outcome, and requirements are documented fully before any development begins. The documents, among many other aspects, include functional specifics, user interfaces, architecture, data structure.
The traditional Waterfall project structure is split into six phases:
Taking into consideration the principles of Waterfall and its resulting pros and cons, this methodology is best for building projects with clear specifications and client requirements. We can think of using Waterfall with projects that are simple, predictable, and well-defined.
For example, the Waterfall approach can be used when adjusting an application to meet specific regulations (e.g., when developing medical systems), or when integrating software with existing infrastructure—e.g., banking systems. In both cases, clear and detailed documentation and specifications are critical to successful project completion.
Here are specific project features that determine if the Waterfall approach is a good fit: