Did you know that the US is to generate nearly $380 billion in revenue in the Internet of Things (IoT) market in 2025? IoTs are becoming essential to countless industries – healthcare, education, and smart homes being only a few of the most common use cases. These devices increase connectivity and make information (or data) sharing easier. However, developing IoT applications is becoming more and more challenging.
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Today, it takes more than just basic coding skills and a little bit of hardware knowledge. With new competitors entering the market and consumers’ demands changing rapidly, your business has to adapt at a fast pace.
The IoT app development process is dynamic. There are often multiple setbacks and rollbacks, and if you’re a developer reading this, it’s not difficult to relate. Therefore, the most important aspect of IoT app development is planning carefully and having a strategy.
Before you write code, clearly define what your IoT app is for. To help you get started, here are a few things you can focus on:
You will automatically discover more nuanced and specific questions to help you set clear goals. In turn, it will be easier to have a list of clear technical and functional requirements for your IoT app. This will prevent delays later in the development.
Just think of it as your roadmap - the clearer it is, the smoother the development process.
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Next up, pick the right platform because this is where most devs make the biggest mistake. The wrong platform will take away the potential for scalability and “growing functionality” in your application. You can try testing through AWS IoT or Google Cloud IoT to simplify the process and make it easier to scale as you grow.
Make sure you’re scalability-focused for your modern IoT apps because if an app cannot grow as quickly as the demand for it, it faces a high potential of market failure. As connected devices grow, so does the data, and your IoT infrastructure should support the user demands without failing on overall performance quality.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help with automatically scaling the infrastructure. They also come in handy with optimizing performance and managing the server load. ML algorithms can analyze user behavior patterns and usage trends and adjust resources correspondingly. They can identify the low and peak periods, maintain high performance, and minimize downtime. AI automation can monitor the server’s health and optimize load balancing to ensure all servers are working as they should without overloading.
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Throughout the development process, keep focusing on the security of your IoT app. Your data, your users’ data, and the overall IoT infrastructure’s security is a paramount concern. With more and more device interactions, the app handles more sensitive data. This often makes IoT a prime target for cybersecurity threats. So, go for robust security measures like:
AI and ML can be a huge help in this ordeal. AI can catch anomalies or deviations in user or device behavior early on, which can be signs of cyber threats. These can include unauthorized access or suspicious device interactions. Such early warnings allow for faster responses and risk mitigation. ML, in turn, studies historical data and helps predict potential threats based on it. By analyzing patterns of previous attacks and incidents, it can give insights into where the next issues may lie. AI and ML allow to implementation of countermeasures before threats escalate, thus mitigating risks of them damaging or stealing valuable data.
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Focus on the overall connectivity of your IoT app. It should have optimized networking protocols to operate seamlessly even in environments with unreliable networks. In doing so, your IoT app shouldn’t be under or over energy-efficient because that directly affects user experience. Try implementing protocols like BLE and MQTT when designing your app.
IoT devices are often built for low energy consumption; however, it varies depending on the device functionality, usage patterns, and communication protocols. AI and ML can optimize energy consumption by tracking it in real time and correct the power correspondingly. Machine Learning can also monitor the network conditions and dynamically adjust the protocols to maintain a consistent connection. By studying the historical data, it can predict future usage patterns and ensure the device has enough power to satisfy users’ needs.
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You are already using dozens of applications every day, if not thousands. And one of the things that separates the best from the “merely optimal” is a great user interface. Therefore, IoT apps should provide an easy-to-understand, intuitive, and adaptive experience. You can go for clear icons, simple navigation, and real-time feedback to improve the overall user experience. Additionally, you can also simplify the interactions, so your app caters to both experts and beginners.
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Finally, when you’ve created the best IoT apps that are gaining traction in the market as you expected, don’t let go of frequent testing. Ensure regular testing of your apps to find performance issues, connectivity issues, and bugs that might make your app lose credibility or functionality down the road. Before you launch, try real-world testing through limited access to target users. It will help you catch issues early and promise a more trustworthy, reliable experience.
Machine Learning technology can really come in handy while testing the device before deployment. It can mostly help with real-world scenario testing by automating the detection of performance issues or bugs. By analyzing data from previous tests, algorithms can identify past patterns and potential issues faster, helping to save time before and during deployment.
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No one argues the complexity of developing IoT applications, especially when starting from scratch. So, here are a few more development hacks that can save you both time and effort.
Another popular development hack to help you tailor your IoT projects is going for IoT-specific software kits and platforms. You can start with dev platforms like Losant or ThingSpeak which have countless pre-built tools and features. That way, you can kickstart the development process and speed up testing to reduce time-to-market.
AI and ML can also be integrated into such platforms to further speed up the development and testing process. These technologies can automate tasks like data analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics, which reduces the need for manual work, thus decreasing time and costs. They can optimize the testing process, quickly identify potential issues, and provide an early warning about them.
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You can also avoid reinventing your wheel every time you start a new app development. Go for pre-built SDKs (software development kits) and APIs for common IoT tasks. Since these tools take care of basic tasks, you can speed up development and guarantee reliable integrations for easier multi-device app performance.
SDKs and APIs that include components for AI and ML can help integrate these technologies into applications more quickly. Providers like OpenAI, Google Cloud AI, Microsoft Azure AI Services, AWS AI Services, etc. offer tools for tasks like natural language processing, computer vision, and others. They will allow you to focus on higher-level development and accelerate your project timeline while simultaneously enhancing the functionality of the IoT app.
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One way you can reduce latency and boost IoT app performance is to use edge computing. This method allows the data to be processed cleanly and closer to the source. So, there’s no “data-jam” between the centralized cloud server and the data source. You process the data locally, which leads to faster response times and less strain on the cloud infrastructure.
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So, developing a successful IoT app will take careful planning and the mix of the right tools. For a company that has used various strategies and platforms for IoT app development, finding the right combination is easier.
However, if you’re a startup, you can follow the pro tips mentioned above. They are based on the expertise of industry experts. With proper planning and a UX-focused strategy, you can deliver seamless experiences to your users.
Moreover, sticking to the right tools with a focus on scalability and security will help you avoid the most common pitfalls – which often include legal and regulatory compliance matters. And finally, keep testing your apps to refine them while discovering new app development tactics to stay competitive.
By integrating AI and ML technologies, you’re not only increasing the efficiency of the IoT app, but you also ensure the future scalability and security of applications. These technologies allow you to collect and analyze huge amounts of data, study past behaviors, predict potential trends, monitor the app performance in real-time to quickly catch on issues and cyber threats, and enhance the app functionality all at the same time. AI and ML automate routine tasks, thus decreasing resources spent and speeding up the time to market.