Why do we keep building apps?

Why do we keep building apps? Ever wondered…?

To find the answer to this tech-domain question, let us just take a step back.

Let’s first skim through some latest and most eye-catching news from the tech industry.

Sam Altman’s “The Future is Here” post on X showcased OpenAI’s latest video generator skills with dolphins and penguins riding bicycles along the seashore and even two golden retrievers podcasting on the top of the mountain.

Neuralink has reported that its first human patient implanted with a brain chip, is successfully able to control a computer mouse by just thinking.

When Nvidia reported stupendous earnings, it had a direct positive impact on indices of at least 3 markets as the stocks of several other tech companies also soared!

In today’s day and age, the evolving tech trends and sustainable tech breakthroughs are going to be one of the most powerful drivers of the evolution of our human species. We are perhaps poised to move into a phase of human evolution where (materialistically) what we can think of … we will be able to create.?

The pace at which we can adopt and adapt the new tech into our daily lives shall determine when these possibilities become our everyday reality and play a major role in enabling our progress as the human species.

This adoption cycle consists of the following three broad steps :

• democratisation of technology by packaging them in operating models that ensure technology available to all in easily consumable chunks and formats.
• regulatory & industry best practices by providing adequate guidance and messaging around responsible and constructive usage of each piece of cutting-edge technology in the form of industry best practice guidelines supported by industry-standard reference models and even need and context-based state regulators for safe consumption. Implementing the previous steps ensures that the new tech pipeline is ready for mass consumption. However, every technology meets its true destiny only when it becomes an integral part of our daily lives in a sustainable seamless manner.?This is where the third step comes in and also takes me back to my initial question…?Why do we keep building apps? And the answer is...
• harness technology to the best to better the human experience ?

Yeah, that is why build apps! To mimic the flow of a certain aspect of our life and harness the power of technology to better our experience of a certain human activity or experience.?

Apps are everywhere - whether it has to do with counting our steps on the daily morning jog, processing an electricity payment on our phone, or sharing our thoughts about a topic on a platform such as LinkedIn - everything has an underlying activity attached to it.

They help us reflect visualize, and pace out our task flow. Apps allow us to gamify, automate real-life tasks, and also to notify, and communicate important updates like notifying a friend when you loan out ￡10 to them, shopping something online, or even flaunting life events and travelogue like we do on Instagram or even more serious (and boring work) like sharing progress quantified across measures and metrics visually represented on dashboards.

While software apps seem practically ubiquitous, there is still a need for more of them! And since there is a need for more software apps, there is an ever-increasing demand for software developers.?

Software developers (along with product managers) are very instrumental in reimagining a better version of our world - one app at a time. ??

Studies show that at a global level, we shall have 28.7 million software developers by the end of 2024. Come to think of it, though a number in millions, it is still just 0.354% of the total projected world population of 8.1 billion by the end of 2024 which is implementing the digitalization processes for all of us!??

But what’s more concerning is that even though millions of us are engaged in software development, our world still faces a severe dearth of software developers. The demand for developers is going up at a CAGR of 25%, yet in 2025, our world will still face a shortage of 4 million developers.?

Now, the shortage of 4 million full-time developers is a huge demand-supply gap to close by sticking to the traditional approach to software development!

Unlike popular belief, here AI can't replace the job of our software developers. The current cusp of tech evolution needs more developers in the coming days to implement the AI capabilities available to us today. Most of the tech giants deeply understand this today and so are proactively upskilling and cross-skilling their workforce to retain them in the longer run. I even have some friends with expertise in the finance domain who have learned computing languages like R, and Python to write code to design and train financial models for the future!

Despite all these measures, there is likely to be a surge of hiring and retention issues especially across the tech domain… developed countries like the UK and the USA have been enlisting Computer Programming and Software Development as an occupation facing a shortage of workforce.?

This problem is real, and unfortunately, here to stay and impact our lives adversely unless…? we take a very different approach to solving such tricky problems.?

Why don't we pivot on technology to solve the people's problem of technology? This brings into the picture the no-code products and platforms.?

No-code platforms come with specific areas of expertise in application architecture and are often a great substitute for certain custom software development and even some standard out-of-the-shelf products.? No-code and low-code* market is currently growing at a CAGR of 20%+ and by 2030 is projected to attain a market size of anything more than $18bn.?

In my opinion, true no-code platforms are the ones that put the power of technology into the hands of the domain experts enabling them to develop and maintain what they need, exactly the way they envision it without the need to write even a single line of code.

Some fun facts on no-code platforms:

• No-code platforms build applications 10x-15x ++ faster?
• Software implementations on no-code platforms reduce tech overall spent by 33.33%-50% as compared to the same project done in conventional software development.
• By next year(2025), 70% of the new enterprise applications will be developed using no-code or low-code* technologies.
• Applications built on no-code platforms report a much higher rate of user acceptance and user satisfaction rate with the business stakeholders than conventional, manual software development.

The increasing adoption of low-code,no-code has set into motion a fundamental change in how we view and organize software development & deployment. Yes, as a long-term effect, it could lead to realignment across different areas of software development - backend, middleware, frontend and could lead to evolution in enterprise architecture designs too.

However, greater no-code adoption is not to be considered a trend that shall be taking away the work of software developers. In the foreseeable future, no-code platforms will be used more in the enterprise cost centers while software developers’ bandwidth shall be focussed more on frontend developments across more revenue-generating operations. Software developers shall also be using low-code products and platforms, but that’s a discussion for another day. ??

No-code products and platforms are here to stay. If you are planning to use a no-code platform and optimize your cost of operations in these trying economic turmoils, here are some cues that might help activate the apt thought process:

• Back office operations such as CRM, HRMS, Asset Management, Rental Management, and the like.
• MVPs, PoCs, and Product Prototyping by R&D units of organizations or product managers who make a plethora of wireframes to track the user journey.

• Critical data at your fingertips. Do you feel the need to have certain business KPIs and datapoints are always available at your fingertips? No-code is a great medium for building no-fancy, fully functional apps across Android, iOS, and the web in one shot and updating them uniformly.
• Automation of Tasks, Onboarding, and Reporting for your workflow consists of multi-staged approvals?
• Regulatory, Policy, and Compliance Workflows are often cut and dry, yet complex workflows that only certain domain experts fully understand and all of us anyways abide by. Let the domain experts build the applications themselves! That’s no code again.
• Gaps in operations that have been troubling you for like EVER… like that audit report that you always need to pull out manually and email another team to upload into their system… does that ring a bell?
• Important… Choose the right no-code platform for your needs. Different no-code platforms prioritize different software development needs. For instance, one might support building your website, another can build a lightweight application for you with a brilliant custom UI while another can maneuver and accommodate very complex workflows and is built to scale and has a basic functional UI. Understanding your needs and aligning accordingly is crucial.

Hope these pointers were useful or at least interesting for you to reflect on. ???Please do share in the comments section.

The no-code space is a nascent yet fast-evolving area in technology. You and I will have to wait and see how they evolve further in the coming days.?

As we wait to see the emerging trends, it's the right time that we onboard our organizations onto the no-code way of the software lifecycle. This shall ensure that we stay ahead of the curve, and build our strategic competitive advantage! This way, we would also be doing our bit for the safe adoption of new tech across the globe as our human race lunges into the next phase of its evolution. Let's build our future the way we envision it... and not necessarily as the (un)favorable world events or the market trends do...

Let's continue building the apps that are most meaningful to us...

To have a discussion about no-code platforms or about technology trends in general, feel free to connect with me at [email protected]

*There is low code too, but that’s food for thought for another day.