With the traffic dividend, the demographic dividend disappears, the golden age of the Internet has quietly passed, and application innovation has also moved from the barbaric era to the refined era. For developers, technological innovation and deep insight into the industry are becoming increasingly important.
According to InfoQ's 2021 Technology Inventory and Outlook, many technologies have undergone profound changes over the past year. The sought-after Serverless applications are more rational, ARTIFICIAL engineering —hyperscale pre-trained models explode, and low code value is recognized. For every developer, whether they can keep up with these technological changes will directly affect their core competitiveness.
It is difficult for a woman to cook without rice. In the technology industry, developers only reserve excellent technology is not enough, to generate enough value through technology, we must also understand the market from the perspective of user needs, choose promising industries, and pay technical capabilities for practical application.
So, what are the good market directions at the moment? (The main source of the data in the article: iResearch Consulting Research Institute)
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The inflection point of intelligent application demand has arrived, and many market prospects can be expected
This problem of the times, from the developers, should be returned to the developers to find. In order to explore the answer to this question, Huawei Developer Alliance and iResearch jointly studied and released the "2022 Mobile Application Trend Insight White Paper", which analyzes the overall development status and environment of the mobile application industry, and presents the current status, potential and prospects of the current hot technologies and industry segments for developers.
The white paper pointed out that as smart devices continue to penetrate into major life scenarios, users have new requirements for smart interconnection across devices, and the user demand for smart reminders, file synchronization, application sharing, IoT data access, and the installation of lightweight applications on smart wearable devices has reached 60% and above.
For new experiences brought by AI such as object recognition, AR display, and semantic processing, the proportion of user demand for related functions is 50%-60%. In the convenient services provided by AI for applications, smart reminders rank first among all services with a user selection rate of more than 65%, indicating that the user's experience of the application is not limited to the display of information, but hopes to have more intelligent services such as information screening, reminders, and pushes. There is no doubt that future applications will tend to be more intelligent, and mobile application developers also need to clearly understand that the inflection point of intelligent application demand has arrived.
Of course, this is not a simple trend judgment. We have also noticed that in the two major industries of audio-visual entertainment and sports and health, there are many distinct "inflection point characteristics".
First of all, in the audio-visual entertainment industry, many indicators have grown considerably. In 2021, the use time of short video applications increased by 17%, and the use time of short video applications accounted for 53.5% of the time spent in audio-visual entertainment applications. The use time of online video represented by iQiyi and Tencent Video increased by 8%, and the stickiness of users increased. At the same time, in 2021, the high penetration rate of audio-visual entertainment applications will remain above 90%. Between 43% and 45% of the time users spend each month using mobile devices, they use AV entertainment apps.
In addition, the white paper also shows that 66.1% of users expect multi-device collaborative audio and video services (such as on-demand sharing, quick connection screen projection and other functions) to be further improved, and such users use 5.8 smart electronic devices per capita, which is higher than the overall level. It can be seen that the rapid growth of the use of time, the high proportion of subdivisions, the ultra-high penetration rate, the change of user demand, etc., all indicate the arrival of the inflection point of intelligent application demand, and also show that multi-device collaboration is a major direction for the development of audio-visual entertainment applications.
In the sports health industry, the potential under the crisis is huge. The number of monthly active devices for healthcare applications increased by 6% year-on-year in 2011, and its payment rate among smart devices was the highest, reaching 70.6%, which shows that under the high penetration rate, while continuing to usher in growth, the commercial value of the sports health industry is considerable.
Of course, the inflection point of intelligent demand is coming, affecting all walks of life. In addition to the trends in the above two markets, more information can be learned by downloading the 2022 Mobile App Trend Insights White Paper.
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In the face of opportunities, the three hot technologies cannot be underestimated
If there is no profit in the business, there will be no soldiers and no war. Just as warriors need good weapons, in the face of strong market opportunities, developers should also choose popular technical directions to maximize their value.
Not only the aforementioned audio-visual entertainment and sports health, in many industries we can see that now the hot Serverless, AI and low-code three technologies have gradually landed, combined with the feedback of many developers, we can expect that the hot technologies represented by these three technologies will also make great progress in the future.
Serverless redefines development to make resources available at will
Serverless covers many technologies and can be basically divided into two categories: FaaS (Function as a Service) and BaaS (Backend as a Service, Backend as a Service). In terms of language and environment, FaaS functions are regular applications. The business code sinks to the function level, and the O&M capability is provided by the integration platform. Some technology giants have predicted that "Serverless may lead cloud native to the next stage of development." When it actually landed, Serverless also showed its unique advantages.
According to InfoQ, the AppGallery Connect Serverless solution has been used in Huawei's internal projects such as Huawei's fast application, translation services, and Huawei's application market intermodal activity spike system, and the research and development efficiency has been greatly improved compared with the previous microservice architecture. Taking translation services as an example, the development team used Serverless cloud functions + cloud storage + cloud database services to efficiently build translation services with high availability and on-demand scaling capacity, reducing manpower by 45% and shortening the R&D cycle by 50% compared with the traditional architectural model.
Low code lowers the bar and addresses long-tail requirements
Low code means using a rapid development approach to deliver applications with minimal code and the fastest speed, in addition to quickly meeting the needs of common scenarios, especially for users' long-tail functional needs.
Nowadays, users' demand for fresh applications is getting higher and higher, and only the traditional development system of the information industry can no longer meet the needs of the times. In this context, more and more enterprises are beginning to choose low-code or no-code platforms to adapt to the times through new development tools.
In the future, the combination of Serverless and low code will further reduce the amount of developer code, development costs, and operation and maintenance workload after launch, and truly realize the low code / low workload of the whole life cycle of the application. The serverless-based low-code platform, combined with low-code solutions in different industries, can further reduce the developer threshold and R&D costs.
AI makes applications more intelligent and lets the world run around users
From intelligent reminders, object recognition to semantic processing, in today's urban life, intelligent applications can be described as ubiquitous, and users' demand for intelligent applications has gradually changed from early adopters to must.
Taking audio-visual entertainment applications as an example, it is not difficult to see that AI has been widely used in audio and video content production and creation, such as AI-assisted video production, intelligent subtitle generation, intelligent translation, special effects generation, etc. Also in sports health applications, the processing of health big data also needs to be done through AI. Completing many tedious and repetitive tasks through AI can greatly reduce the burden on development and product-related personnel and provide convenience to users.
The Video Editor Kit launched by HMS Core provides a product-level SDK for application developers, including one-stop processing capabilities such as video import, rendering, export, and media asset management required for video editing, and is simple to access and stable. After the Love Clip App is connected to the video editing service, it has developed interesting editing methods that many users like, such as AR face swapping, split keying, portrait effects, music card points, etc., which have won the praise of many users.
In the field of AI, HMS Core Machine Learning Service (ML Kit) provides developers with a wealth of text, speech language, image and face human body services, allowing applications to achieve a new visual and linguistic AI experience. According to the developer's feedback, after accessing the machine learning service, the face human body detection speed increased by 70%, the text recognition accuracy rate was as high as 99%, the language text supported Six languages in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Western, the recognition accuracy rate was as high as 95%, and the model customization function and AI reasoning function were provided, so that developers could define their own models and realize model reasoning at a small cost.
A network infrastructure service suite, the Network Kit, is also available in HMS Core. Network Kit supports common network protocols, and supports developers to automatically orchestrate network components according to business scenarios, automatically warm up and dynamically tune the network, so that applications have a higher performance, high reliability, and high security network environment. Game applications have high requirements for the network, and after connecting to network Kit, Douluo Continent Soul Master Showdown not only supports game resource pack background download and resumable transmission, but also increases the overall download speed by 40%.
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The Huawei Developer Alliance helps developers seize opportunities in an all-round way
Developers often need to develop experience, resources and skills in the process of developing projects, and also need to grasp the needs of the project. After product development is complete, the product needs to be tested, which is only the first step about the product. The subsequent distribution and operation make developers not only need to pay attention to the project itself, but also need to provide a complete set of solutions and implementation of how the product is favored by users, which puts forward higher requirements for developers.
Relying on open capabilities in all scenarios, global platform deployment, full-lifecycle services, and full-link ecological operations, huawei developer alliances use a one-stop support platform to help developers succeed, helping developers realize the application ecological business closed loop from development, testing, promotion, and monetization. From development to operation, we continue to empower developers, including continuously providing rich online learning courses in the Developer Academy, creating a community platform for developers to interact and communicate online, and providing urban community positions where in-depth communication can be carried out offline, setting up multiple projects such as the HDG Huawei Developer Community Program, the HSD Huawei Campus Developer Program, and the HDE Huawei Evangelist Program, and more and more developers are directly or indirectly benefiting from the Huawei Developer Alliance.
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end
Gentleman's nature is not different, good at false things. The golden decade of mobile Internet has become a past, and how to grasp the next decade is a proposition closely related to every developer. The so-called crisis is the coexistence of danger and opportunity. As long as we find the right direction, be prepared, focus on the long term, and grasp every step of the moment, we can have enough confidence to deal with the changes in the mobile Internet in the present, and calmly deal with the future of the technology circle.