Apple has devoted time and effort to developing its iOS platform, both hardware, and software, in ways that made it possible to extend it down to less powerful wearable devices and back up to their Mac computers.
Apple’s iOS 15 and iOS 16 most impressive features are not the ones that level up the iPhone in the smartphone market, as neither is Apple silicon implementation in Mac OS the fact that you can now run iOS apps on a Mac. The most impressive features that Apple is pushing forward are those that continue to integrate its ecosystem in ways we have not seen before from any other manufacturer.
With this in mind, these are some of the main trends to consider as we reach the end of 2022.
Apple’s cross-platform applications
In 2020, Apple announced its intention to move its Mac computers away from hardware chips manufactured by Intel and begin building new iterations of its hardware using its own Apple Silicon chips, unveiled in November of that year. We expect the last iteration of Macs with Apple Silicon chips before the end of 2022, finally closing the chapter of Intel Macs.
The introduction of the Apple Silicon chip aims to make Apple’s cross-platform application development and launch much smoother for iOS developers. More than a ubiquity of apps across the apple ecosystem, developers can think about their users’ workflow in terms of which hardware device is more suitable for a specific task within their app and offer the ability seamlessly to jump from capturing data on an iPhone to process it on a Mac, produce its final touches on an iPad to present it on an Apple TV.
More innovations in Augmented Reality and Machine Learning
Apple AR frames become more mature each year and are likely to join their competitors in the field of dedicated AR smart glasses. These include Epson’s MOVERIO BT-300, Everysight Raptor, and Toshiba dynaEdge AR100 Viewer.
Historically, Apple has been among many ML leaders in the technology sector. For example, at the 2017 Global Developer Conference, the company announced plans to launch its Core ML system that presents benefits for both developers and iOS users, including the ability to run advanced neural networks, implement Core ML models using CloudKit and convert library models like PyTorch. and TensorFlow in Core ML models.
As 2022 is nearly over, we can expect to witness AR, ML, artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies converging into a completely new product from Apple and its competitors in the future.
Cross-platform mobile development
As the popularity of the React Native open-source user interface software framework has waned, other cross-platform mobile development technologies such as Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) began to take hold in the iOS development world. The latter, KMM, aims to be the bright star of cross-platform development by leveraging the best of native and cross-platform approaches.
In addition, KMM is often seen as the suggested cross-platform development technology for new native projects, particularly on mobile devices running the Android operating system. However, KMM will probably shine moving forward due to its ability to seamlessly place the intact Android business logic code on a project running on the iOS operating system.
Apple expected to announce improved app development features
Before Apple released iOS 13 and macOS 10.15, most Apple platform developers relied on an imperative user interface approach to implement their applications’ functionality, appearance, and behavior. However, since then, SwiftUI, the declarative framework of Apple’s user interface, has become increasingly popular with developers of Apple platforms, as it allows them to reason about the status of the application in a more simplified way.
Swift has come a long way in recent years, allowing developers to create and launch applications across all Apple platforms using as little code as possible. With SwiftUI maturing slowly and new features like Swift Concurrency, we can expect to experience new generations of engineers who have never experienced the «old ways» of developing applications on Apple platforms.
Wearable technology and smart devices
In the technology field, time is everything; launch an innovative product too late and will fight for a share of sales to the consumer in a saturated market but launch one too soon and the technology itself may never be more widely adopted. Such was the case with the launch of Google with its glasses in 2014 when hands-free technology and deeper integration of AI and ML into mobile devices were still a few years away.
However, times have changed. Wearable technology and smart devices are again at the forefront of innovation, and Apple already has a considerable advantage over many of its main competitors in this sector.
As we reach the end of 2022, we expect a gradual shift in consumer markets away from traditional displays and closer to portable devices. While more widespread adoption of wearable technology in most consumer markets is likely a few years away, 2023 is likely to bring a whole new class of user interfaces designed to be used without a large and cumbersome display for many everyday tasks.
