It’s hard to predict with 100% accuracy where the wind of technological development will blow in the upcoming decades. However, the waves that specific trends leave on the surface of the digital ocean help businesses to understand where to invest in the nearest future to keep their services competitive. Moreover, when you follow the best software development practices, you can avoid the increase of technical debt, which helps to decrease the probability of labor-intensive reworks in the future. In simple words, it’s better to follow the progress by upgrading your software systems and services gradually rather than choosing a simple path and finding yourself in a position where you must make a giant leap to stay afloat. Therefore, today we offer you to take a look at tech trends that will have a significant impact in the coming year.
6 Tech Trends to Expect in 2023
Prepare to See More AI and Witness How it Becomes Adaptive
It’s not big news that software built with a pinch Artificial Intelligence is on the rise. Applying AI and ML algorithms can help companies from various industries to improve dozens of daily operations, from making sure that the warehouse has enough inventory to meet consumer demand, to predicting how this demand will change over time. In 2022, the outcomes of AI development have become something of an average user can test and use with no obstacles. DALL-E can generate custom images and make everybody feel like a digital artist. Google’s Dream Fusion 3D can generate 3D objects following the user’s prompt, which can simplify game development. ChatGPT, an AI chat bot that can, among other things, fix errors in your source code examples, is so good at what it does that people started posting these suggestions on StackOverflow. However, the StackOverflow team had to ban such posts, since pretty often people were using the results generated by the AI system in topics they know nothing about.
In 2023, there will be more AI-powered services and the pace of its development makes it hard to predict which spheres of our lives it’ll affect. Companies that are involved in market competition, however, have their own opinion on how AI-based software should benefit their business. There’s no doubt, AI services that can turn your cat into an anime character using a photo deserve proper appreciation, but what businesses need is optimized workflow and improved data security. For this purpose, Adaptive AI can be applied. These new generation AI systems process changing circumstances happening in real-world situations to adjust their behavior accordingly. Instead of using accumulated data to learn an AI system once and then deploy it, adaptive AI development implies continual learning and deployment. Such systems can receive new data from IoT devices, for example. Such an approach can be used for creating self-driving cars, smart assistants, social media monitoring services, etc.
If You’re Tired of Regular Applications, Prepare Yourself for Superapps
Don’t get too excited with this one. Despite the name, unlike Superman compared to ordinary people, superapps don’t provide any unprecedented functionality that regular apps can’t offer. The term itself is pretty old by the software development industry standards. It appeared more than a decade ago to describe an ecosystem that users can utilize to access many applications and services. Working as a portal to multiple services one may need every day, superapps are great alternatives to tons of separate applications in which you can get lost at some point. As an example of such apps, we can note Revolut, a service that helps people make better financial decisions, or Grab that started as an Uber alternative and now allows users sending packages and making online payments.
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Currently, this software development trend is mostly noticeable in Asia and Latin America, but as Gartner says, by 2027 over 50% of people all around the globe will use superapps.
Reaching Industry 4.0 With Industrial Cloud Platforms
Companies that provide cloud software development services, in 2023, will have more to offer their potential customers. Unlike building traditional clouds, this software development approach helps manufacturers to become closer to the so-called Industry 4.0 stage. It means that physical objects such as machinery collide with digital systems via IoT and robotics, shaping an entirely new technological landscape.
Software development specialists who work on industry cloud platforms pay due attention to vertical integration, which enables a flow of data among all company departments. It enables additional levels of flexibility, helps to manage the workloads more efficiently, and allows changing business processes faster.
Rise Of DevSecOps
Software development is not always about creating eye-catching user interfaces and services that automate our routine tasks. Each system has tons of potential security vulnerabilities and if an application requires the use of personal data to provide services, data breaches can be very harmful. Hackers use more and more sophisticated algorithms to get sensitive information in their possession and the security skills of average users do not always correspond to a constantly increasing level of threat. Not everybody can identify a phishing link and the amount of people who still use “12345” as their password remains too high. Such a background forces software development companies to revise their application security approach. One of the possible options developers can choose is to add some “Sec” to their DevOps, which helps to make it much better from the security standpoint.
DevSecOps or Development, Security, and Operations helps to integrate security initiatives into every stage of SDLC, following which a specific software product or service is built. Here, you don’t separate security issues and software development itself. Instead, you make them an integral part of the process. For example, security must become a part of software requirements, and the team must test the system early and make it as often as possible. Coding standards are different in DevSecOps as well. Thus, developers focus on security from the first stages of a project lifetime, which helps to avoid costly reworks in the future and reduce time-to-market.
Metaverse and Web3 Will Change Our Vision of the Web
In 2022, we witnessed a significant shift in how we interact with the Internet itself and with other people on the web. The idea behind metaverse was on the surface from the very start of the VR technology boom. If we can use a pair of VR glasses to play video games, why don’t we use it to navigate the Internet? It can change our perception of virtual environments and make them close to reality. As you can imagine, the appearance of metaverse opened new business niches for everybody brave enough to face new challenges. Currently, the potential of this sphere of software development is not fully unlocked, which will make it more interesting to follow metaverse progress in 2023.
Web3 is a completely different story. It utilizes blockchain features to make digital services as decentralized as the current state of technology allows. Decentralized and encrypted, our data becomes more secure, and new ways of accessing and analyzing it enable outstanding flexibility.
More Green Technology
Ensuring the security of applications and digital services is a good thing for sure, but how about the security of the entire planet? Here, the news is optimistic. Initiatives intended to lower carbon emissions won’t go anywhere and some new technologies will appear to help us solve the issue. Say green hydrogen is a source of energy with significantly reduced emissions of greenhouse gasses. Among the companies involved in active development of this technology, you, for example, can find such an industry giant as Shell.
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Another example is decentralized power grids. It’s an alternative to large powerplants and the main idea here is to invest in the development of small generators that can power local communities and won’t overproduce. The software development industry can also affect green initiatives. For example, digitalisation is one of the key factors enabling a more transparent digital energy infrastructure that complies with modern security standards.
Conclusions
For those who closely follow the tech trends, most upcoming innovations don’t seem to be such a big deal. The software development industry was gradually improving the functionality that AI-based services provide and making them adaptive is only a step further. Security issues never fell out of focus of both specialists and ordinary users. It’s hard to find somebody who doesn’t use digital services nowadays, and most of us ask ourselves whether a new app provides an appropriate level of security or not, so increased interest in DevSecOps is pretty natural. However, if we look at the picture from a bird’s-eye view, we’ll see that the pace of technological development is incredibly fast. Ten or even five years ago we couldn’t imagine what range of possibilities software will provide soon. Therefore, if some of the mentioned technological trends don’t take your breath away, see them as a tiny step of a decades-long journey.
If you want to improve your services to make sure they correspond to the 2023 software development trends, contact us.