Key Trends in Android for 2018

We are living now in an era of technology and innovations and each day its changing. From time to time, the communication medium was also changing form letter to telephone and then to mobile phones etc. But looking deep into it, we can notice a much change came in the mobile technology. If mobile phone came to as just as a communication medium, now it is changed completely. Now everything is coming to the mobile devices.

Now more than 80% of overall usage in the internet is via Mobile phones. And this change came once the Android mobiles became popular. Now more than 70% mobile phones run on Android platform and this make the Operating system more popular too. Because of this fact, Google is making their Operating system more and more feature rich all the time. Today, we are going to see the key trends in Android in the year of 2018.

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Main 3 trending factors which we considered are

  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • Security

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a project by google which makes the normal website more mobile compatible, It’s a minimized mobile version of the website. Earlier, website is made with responsive layout only, which makes the desktop version mobile friendly too. Now using the AMP architecture, a much polished and minimalistic html structure can be used exclusively for mobile devices. So that the AMP version requires only minimum resources and thus its loads faster too.

From last year onwards, the AMP pages got much more popularity and google also started giving more priority to AMP pages in its search result, while you are searching something from your mobile devices. Its much clear from the latest report also. As per the report, more than 70% of the search result we are getting from google are of AMP pages, which is of 30% higher than last year’s report.

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Hence the need of AMP enabled web pages are now a must thing for all the websites. More are more websites are now enabling AMP pages to that too. There are some benefits there, if your run a AMP enabled page for mobile devices.

Increased Mobile Visits

Since the web pages are AMP enabled, it makes the pages look much user friendly without additional components such as widgets, sidebar and other items. So, the page looks simple and gives the user a good reading experience too. Which make the page to achieve more visits.

Decreased Bounce Rate

Since the web page is much more user friendly and readable, it will help users to navigate easily to other pages, hence to reduce the bounce rate also, usually in normal mobile responsive page, the the loading also takes more time and users may find difficulty to find the internal links too.

Increased Search Rank

As we mentioned previously, Google is now giving more priority for AMP web pages than the normal web pages, if two web pages having same search value in terms of result, google will give more priority to AMP page than the normal one. So its now clear that in the coming years, AMP pages will gain more attraction in the search results than the normal web pages.

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Increased Ad Impression and Click rates

Since the visits to AMP pages increases, the ad impression rate also increases, if you are publishing ads on your website. Also, the minimalistic html structure also enables to place ads in more productively within the content itself without affecting the user experience, which in turns increase the click rate also. So the overall ad revenue will increased.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is another main trend in the modern world, since the mobile based application came in popularity, more and more application now uses Artificial Intelligence technology within it to meet the requirements, Bot enabled services within the mobile apps, web apps also uses the AI technology within it to meet with the end users requirements. Now AI enables chat bots are available in most of the services. So, most of the general queries can be answered by the bot itself, rather than utilizing human time. When complex requirement comes, then the same chat can be handled by the human.

Google using this AI technology in their Assistance App on Android devices and now most of the businesses including Banks and shopping platforms integrating Automated response system using the AI technology in their apps and websites. Earlier this year Google CEO Sunder Pichai at the Google I/O conference said that now, the technology is moving to an AI-first world. There is also report as per Gartner that by the year of 2019, 20% overall user interaction with their device will be done using the AI enabled Virtual Personal Assistance.

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Now, even smartphones are embedded with AI too, which marks the latest development too. Huawei recently released the first AI enabled mobile in the market. Now, Google also providing AI enabled chip set in their Pixel Mobiles which helps the developers to design smart automated mechanism using the on board environment.

“We are looking at a future where Mobile Phone Applications are going to get smart & contextual, as we are already working on projects which has Voice as a primary user input tool. The biggest challenge with Voice is not just understanding the intent of the Voice but to recognize the action from the intent as well and there is no better tool than NNAPI which can make all this possible”.

3. Security

Security is another major factor when considering to the Android platform. When more and more users engage in the smartphone usage, there will be more concern about security too. When more usage is made using the smartphones the risk for data lose, hacking etc. also increase. Even the ecommerce websites also now doing their sale mostly through the mobile apps, which increase the need of added security on the platform also. Considering these facts, Google is modifying its operating system with added features along with more security updates each time. From each version of the Android, we can see this trend also. From Android 6 Marshmallow onward, there is permission control feature added on the phone. Using this feature, All the application installed on the mobile will not get all the access permission. Here user will have the privilege to control the permission, which was not possible on the previous versions.

We can monitor each app and we can disable the access of an application to access certain area. eg: we can disable the storage or contact access of a News app, if the app Is not giving us download functionality or contact sync feature. Like the same, we can monitor all the apps and we can decide which apps to have access to any feature or area.

Considering these fact, In late December, Google announced a new plan to verify app authenticity within the Google Play Store. Google also launched a fresh effort to warn users about mobile apps and websites that might collect personal data without consent (a far more pressing concern than malware for businesses and individuals alike). Along with this, now google is also using its own Play Protect app to scan all the apps installed on the Android Device from the Play Store to ensure the security and safety.

Along with all these further steps, Google is planning to set up a Play for enterprises platform— a system that allows companies to “safely and quickly distribute private enterprise apps,” as the company put it in a late-November promotion — and at the same time highlighting how its own Pixel hardware features a new type of tamper-resistant security module created “for enterprise-grade security.”

Conclusion

We can conclude the things here saying that, technology is growing rapidly with more and more advanced and user friendly innovative ideas, however along with all these, security is also the main area to be covered. We need more and more user friendly and handy technology in the growing world, but at the same time we need our data and privacy should be on same side too.

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