Custom software development today is even more demanded than ever before thanks to growing focus shift towards personalized and individualized experiences in almost every sphere, be that finances, marketing, sales, entertainment, office works, customer relationship, or other user experiences.
Examples of custom software development can be seen in healthcare, retail, finances, education, business, ecommerce, and many other industries. Apparently, with such a great demand in custom software development services, the future of companies offering such solutions looks quite optimistic.
Let’s peek into the future of custom development and see the actual trends that are shaping it now.
Top trends in custom software development
Cloud-based solutions
Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular in custom software development as it allows businesses to store and access data remotely, collaborate on projects in real-time, and scale their infrastructure as needed. Cloud-based solutions are also more cost-effective than traditional on-premise solutions.
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure are examples of cloud computing platforms for quick building and deployment of custom software and apps.
AI-assisted development
AI-driven software development is relatively new, but already promising direction. Prior to recent years, systems with elements of Artificial Intelligence were widely used in recommendation systems, marketing, data science and analysis, business forecasting and other spheres. But since ChatGPT has revolutionized the way AI works with language models, a whole new land in custom software development has been discovered.
AI quickly penetrates more and more industries. Image and video generation. Writing texts. Composing music. Today, AI-assisted solutions can even write Python or JS code. Apparently, there is a lot of space for software development companies to apply their skills in building and training various AI models. Importantly, such AI-driven software development really helps to reduce development time as well as allows businesses to achieve better results with less effort.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
Progressive Web Applications is another powerful trend in software development, especially when it comes to building custom solutions.
PWA combines merits of both traditional web applications and native apps. Like a web app, it works in a browser. Like a native app, it works offline. Plus, there are scalable, so the same app can smoothly operate on a wide range of devices, from legacy ones, to the latest flagship models. That’s where “progressive” comes from.
Web 3.0
After Web 2.0 reshaped the Internet in 2000s, web development technologies continued to evolve. Now, it’s Web 3.0 that’s in the fashion.
Here are its main features:
- Web 3.0 apps are more secure and more tailored to personal information protection.
- Decentralization gets control over personal data back to end users.
- Better scalability further enhanced principles of responsive web design onto the data usage and transmission. This means that Web 3.0 apps should work on almost any devices and be able to handle huge load of traffic without performance degradation.
- Blockchain support. Web 3.0 is decentralized, and the most successful example of decentralization today is blockchain technologies.
Web 3.0 is mostly a concept now, embodied only in parts. But taking this trend into account during custom software development is already a must.
Microservices
This new approach to software architecture implies using small modules that can easily attach to each other like Lego to add almost any functionality to almost any application, on demand and with little to no extra coding.
Microservices architecture is a real, palpable future of custom software development, because it already provides a range of benefits to developers, namely:
- Scalability of apps. Developers can upscale or downscale any microservice independently providing great adaption to almost any needs and requirements. And you don’t need to scale the entire app then.
- Faster development and deployment. The modular architecture promotes faster coding, testing and fixing of applications as well as prompter delivery of custom tailored solutions to end users.
- Flexibility. With a wide choice of pre-developed microservices, a company can almost instantly combine them to deliver any imaginable combination of functions, designs and user experiences required by the specification.
Internet of Behavior
Another trend with exciting potential that could revolutionize not only custom software development, but also the very way we interact with the world and the Internet now. Internet Of behavior or IoB connects two bleeding edge technologies – AI, IoT, and machine learning – into something new. Something that can allow for more natural communication with devices and software, something we merely starting to see today in various voice assistants and chatbots.
Briefly, the idea behind IoB is as follows. The apps collect the data about typical behavior of a user and then try to predict his or her interests, based on machine-learned and AI-assisted assumptions. Moreover, IoB collects data on behavior, interests, and even emotions of users automatically through computer vision and big data analysis, and therefore can provide user feedback on certain products and services in real time. In turn, this allows service providers and manufacturers to better understand user’s needs and make appropriate modifications to respective services, also in real time.
Infrastructure as Code
The technology behind this trendy name can literally reshape the future of custom software development. The practice of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) treats infrastructure components and their configurations as code, utilizing scripts and configuration files to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of components like servers, storage, and networking devices.
Treating infrastructure as code allows developers to automate many development, testing and deployment tasks. It also eliminates many scaling problems caused by differences in implementation of software best practices in different web architectures.
In addition, IaC approach has the following benefits:
- Reduces development times. IaC scripts can be reused multiple times and simplify version control, so developers need less time to make things work.
- Improves reliability. Testing of the app in various infrastructures becomes easier and safer.
- Better collaboration between developers. Just like any other code, IaC code can be shared, forked, reviewed and commented. This promotes faster and more efficient collaboration in software development companies.
Conclusion
As you can see, the future of custom software development companies is rather bright and promising. And if you need to hire a custom development team to implement an application of software, we at CUP IT are ready to come forward. With more than 10 years of experience in software development, and thanks to our specialty in AI, ML, and DevOps, we are in the swim of all current custom development trends, and can turn them to your business advantage. Contact us.