How is AI affecting how we build apps?

Over the last few months, if you have ever opened an email or a news site, you would come across the word AI.?

We should thank ChatGPT for bringing this Generative AI-based platform into the market and showing the world how creative it can be.

It has had such a significant impact that most businesses are exploring how AI can help them improve their productivity. The software development and mobile apps industry is no different.

AI in the app development industry

The app development industry has been one of the few industries that has started to explore and implement AI into its day-to-day processes, including the app development process.?

If you have been in the app development industry for a while, you would know that Google and Stackoverflow have been the developer's best friends for ages. But these were like guiding lights, and developers still had to find their way to the solution.?

The new AI-based solutions like ChatGPT have become more like an extra pair of hands that can directly take you to the solution.

This has helped boost the adoption of AI-based tools within the app development industry faster.

Exploring the potential benefits of using AI:

This adoption has brought out some benefits that can enhance and improve the app development process. Here are a few of the benefits:

Improved Efficiency:

The margin for error decreases when you have an AI as a sidekick that can instantly help you answer any development-focused questions. Its ability to provide the developer with a complete piece of code as a solution improves their efficiency by enabling them to do more in less time.

Improved Focus:

As developers integrate AI-based tools into their development process, they can efficiently work with these tools to identify repetitive pieces of code or processes, which can be easily replicated by the AI instantly. This saves time and enables developers to spend more time and focus on developing new or unique app features.

Improved Code Quality:

AI tools can help developers by automatically refactoring the code generated by the developers, which not only saves time but also ensures that the quality of the code is improved, so any future developers picking up this app can efficiently work with it.

Improved App Quality:

Automated testing has already been available for app developers to implement and see if all the functionality in the app is working as intended. It had its limits regarding what it could do, but with new AI-based tools, it's possible to do more extensive tests to help the developers identify and fix these issues.?

This will improve the app's quality and create a better experience for the end users.

How can AI streamline the app development process?

Using the proper set of AI tools will be very simple for app development businesses to streamline their complete app development process.?

Even if we leave the core coding work, many other bits of work must be done in sync to run an app development process smoothly.

Think of things like auto-resizing images or graphics based on the platform being built for tracking the progress of the work using various project management tools or even creating quick prototypes based on designs generated by the design team, which can all streamline and improve the development process.

With the proper set of AI tools, mobile app development, deployment, and even maintenance can be smooth.

What are the challenges of using AI in the app development process?

No tool ever built in the world is without limitations; that's why customisation is a massive business for any tool. It's the same thing for AI-based tools. Although they have significant advantages, it does come with a few challenges that app developers should be wary of.?

Here are a few of them:

Challenges with Data:

Most AI tools work based on learning and understanding the data it has been trained on. It uses the data to predict or generate solutions based on what it has learned from that data.?

If the data used to train the AI tools is incorrect or faulty, it creates wrong predictions or solutions, which might damage the outcome.

Challenges with Customisation:

AI tools can do customisation well, but they need much data fed into their learning algorithm to identify the details required for customisation. However, during the development process, it might be unable to provide out-of-the-box solutions as it might have been trained on generic information.?

Challenges with Creativity:

Like customisation, AI-based tools will be very challenging to provide creative solutions to the development process's requirements. Think of things like the generation of a logo, which an AI can do, but it might not be able to identify the unique set of thoughts, emotions and ideas that the app's owner might have.

Challenges with Innovation:

AI tools cannot build something innovative by themselves; they usually take references from existing solutions and recreate something similar yet unique. This is why AI tools will automate the essential tasks first. More complicated and innovative tasks will require a lot of thinking, creativity, and trial and the ability to identify trends that keep changing in the market.

What are the ethical and privacy considerations when using AI?

As discussed above, AI needs to be trained on data, so this data needs to come from somewhere. Most small or medium businesses (sometimes even large businesses) might not have access to enough data in-house to train these AI tools directly. They will likely let the AI tool crawl the web, find relevant data and train itself to use it.?

When this kind of solution is applied, it becomes a challenge for developers in the app development process.?

The biggest concern is ethical ownership of the data and the results generated using that data; who ideally owns that, and if the output generated by the AI-based tool is wrong or abusive, who is finally responsible for that??

Think of it from an app development perspective: if you have built an MVP using an AI-based application tool and released it into the market.

?You were unaware if the app had a set of designs that another company copyrighted. What can you do when the company finds that out and sues you as an app developer? Can you blame it on the AI, or would you have to take responsibility for it?

Another challenge that comes with using AI tools is that of privacy. When using an AI tool for your development process, you will likely enter a lot of data about yourself and your development work into that tool.?

If the AI tool is set up so that it keeps learning and putting out solutions from every user that uses it, it is very likely for the AI tool to expose confidential code or information to some other user as it looks at it as just data.

This is the same reason why most large corporations have banned the usage of tools like ChatGPT for their employees.?

Conclusion:

There is scope for using AI and AI-based tools to improve the productivity of the whole app development industry. But it needs to be complimented by the human developers as well. Developers who can bring their creativity and love into the app development process, which an AI cannot bring as of now.

There needs to be a perfect blend of AI and humans to build the ideal team that can improve the efficiency and productivity of the whole app development process.