In 2025, people downloaded apps close to 150 billion times across the App Store and Google Play. Although that is a lot of high-income potential, it is also a huge competition. To provide a high-quality solution, it is necessary to be aware of market strategies.
That’s why we’ve collected the mobile app development trends that will stay relevant in 2026. In this article, you’ll find our top picks covering both global dynamics and niche development. So let’s get started!
Now, let’s review the latest mobile app development trends in detail.
AI integration is one of the mobile app development trends, and it kept growing through 2026. Generative AI apps were downloaded 3.8 billion times in 2025, double the year before. They took more than $5 billion in in-app purchases over the same period. People spent 48 billion hours inside them, across more than a trillion sessions.
Looking forward, AI mobile apps are expected to take $4.25 billion in global consumer spend. As of January 2025, AI-powered photo and video editors generated around a fifth of all revenue from AI consumer apps:
Downloads concentrate around a handful of names. Between 1 January and 5 May 2026, ChatGPT was the most downloaded app in the United States at 41.8 million installs, with Google Gemini second at 19.22 million. Grok took about 8.83 million downloads in April 2026, a 46% drop from the previous month after peaking earlier in the year.
ChatGPT also holds the launch record for a generative AI app, with almost 9.4 million downloads in its first ten days. It went on to become the first mobile app to reach a billion monthly active users.
By 2026, AI has affected almost every industry.
Among the largest banks in the world, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Royal Bank of Canada have the highest AI adoption. AI development trends transform banking apps into personalized services, fraud detection, and automated customer support.
In turn, retail apps will focus on personalized shopping with AI-based recommendations. A survey among millennials and gen-zers showed that they are interested in AI-powered online shopping for 3 main reasons:
Among retail investors, the main reason for using AI/ML development services was to help analyze specific stocks or assets. Thus, investment apps with robust artificial intelligence analytics will be in demand.
The fintech AI market grew to $44.08 billion in 2024, forecasted to surpass $50 billion by 2029. Among the fintech mobile app trends are smart financial advice, algorithmic trading, and secure AI transactions.
As for AI payments, younger respondents were more likely to use them. However, it remained low across all age groups. Most people still don’t feel confident with the idea of using AI in digital payments.
The use of AI in travel apps is also growing. 63% of U.S. travelers used AI for planning via a phone or tablet. Among the popular requests:
Besides, people often turn to virtual travel agents for help. This indicates a boost in the number of travel apps with chatbots. AI-enabled planning is also among the trending apps. For example, Taskade AI productivity. The app gained rapid popularity with 500k+ downloads in the Play Store. It is suitable for both work teams and personal planning. Taskade has features to answer complex questions and organize up to 500+ tasks.
Almost half of US adults show interest in AI products, but 74% express concern about data privacy. So developers should take this into account to use this trend’s application potential.
Until recently, almost every AI feature in an app made a round trip to a server. That has changed, and of all the current trends in mobile app development, this is the one with the shortest path to a shipped feature. Both platforms now let an app call a model that lives on the phone, which makes it one of the more consequential iOS app development trends in years, with Android moving the same way.
On iOS, Apple’s Foundation Models framework gives an app direct access from Swift to the same on-device model that powers Apple Intelligence. There is no server to run and no cost per request. The 2026 release added image input, so an app can reason about a photo or a screenshot, along with a single interface that can also reach cloud models when a task needs one.
On Android, ML Kit‘s GenAI APIs handle summarisation, proofreading, rewriting, image description and custom prompts on the device itself. They keep working when the phone has no connection.
An AI agent is an app feature that completes a task for the user, working through several steps while the person states only the goal. A chatbot answers a question about booking an appointment. An agent books it.
Agents work by publishing what an app can do. The app describes its available actions in a form the operating system’s assistant can read. The assistant interprets a typed or spoken request, matches it to one of those actions, and passes the work back to the app. Apple’s developer tools added new primitives for agentic features in 2026, so an app can offer its actions to Apple Intelligence and have them called from outside the app.
Here are the current numbers on AI agent mobile app trends:
Platform support for agents is running ahead of developer adoption. For an app team, publishing a small set of actions is inexpensive, and it makes the app reachable from the assistants people already use daily.
AI has changed how apps are built as well as what they do. In a mobile codebase, AI tools now complete functions, generate components from a short description, write test scaffolding, and translate code between platforms.
Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey, based on 33,662 responses to its AI questions, gives the clearest picture of its adoption:
Adoption has outpaced confidence, which puts more weight on code review. The skills a mobile developer needs have tilted toward recognizing when generated code is subtly wrong and constantly testing it.
For the first time since 2019, most people know the rules that protect them. 53% of consumers say they are aware of their country’s privacy law, and 75% say they would not buy from an organisation they do not trust with their data.
The same research found that 49% of people aged 25 to 34 have switched to a different company over how it handles their data.
Companies must meet these application development trends to ensure user retention. As did DuckDuckGo, a popular private browser with 50m+ downloads in the Play Store. It is a cookie-free search engine that allows you to block web and app tracking and provides email protection. In June 2026, DuckDuckGo drew about 689.5 million visits in a month.
Demand for Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps has also increased. In 2022, the VPN market grew to $44.6 billion and is forecast to grow by 15.1%, reaching $137.7 billion by 2030.
Legislation has become a source of new requirements for app developers. Since 1 January 2026, the Texas App Store Accountability Act has required app stores to verify a user’s age and obtain a parent’s consent before a minor downloads an app or makes a purchase. Other states have passed versions of the same law.
Developers carry their own share of the work. Every app and every in-app purchase needs an age rating in one of four bands, covering under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, and 18 and over, and that rating goes to each store. Any age or consent data an app receives back has to be encrypted and used only for compliance, then deleted.
Payments moved at the same time. A US court barred Apple in April 2025 from stopping developers linking out to their own payment pages, and in December 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld the finding that Apple had breached the original order. What commission Apple may charge on those external purchases went back to the district court and remains open.
Both changes affect account handling and payment flows. Among the mobile app development trends of 2026, compliance is the one with a fixed date attached.
Users split their time across two app stores with different rules, different review processes and different tooling. That is one reason developers are turning to one of the mobile app trends, cross-platform development. This approach allows building software that runs on different mobile operating systems from a single code base. It is a cost-effective and efficient way to reach a wider audience.
Cross-platform apps are gaining popularity due to their ability to provide the same user experience on iOS and Android devices. This speeds up the development cycle and reduces costs, which makes it attractive to businesses.
Cross-platform development is popular among well-known brands, such as Instagram and Google Ads, as well as new launches. Although this is not a new trend, it will continue to grow in 2026.
Foldables stopped being a curiosity the moment the biggest phone maker joined in. IDC expects the category to grow around 30% in 2026, with Apple’s first foldable iPhone taking roughly 22% of units and about 34% of the category’s value in its first year. Thus, development that supports these displays is one of the latest trends in mobile apps.
Many popular apps, such as Google Calendar and YouTube, have already adapted their interfaces to foldable devices. So now there are two ways forward for app developers: customizing existing solutions and creating new ones.
Wearable devices are now at their peak of popularity. In 2022, the number of connected wearables worldwide reached about 1.1 billion. And integrating software with these products, from smartwatches to smart glasses, is one of the hottest mobile app trends.
The growth of the wearables market is primarily driven by sales of smartwatches. Their worldwide shipments are forecast to grow from 37 million units in 2016 to over 402 million in 2027.
Companies are constantly updating their smartwatches to improve the user experience. For example, one of the biggest updates is Apple WatchOS 27, which includes Siri AI. It offers new ways to navigate and new Smart Stack suggestions. It also features updated Liquid Glass design refinements, a more intuitive Find My app, and new Workout Buddy insights.
Shipments of smart glasses reached about 2.25 million units in the first quarter of 2026, up 167% year over year. IDC forecasts 13.6 million units for the full year, a rise of 41.4%, growing to 27.3 million by 2030. Meta held 69.2% of the category in that first quarter. It is early, but it is the fastest-moving surface in consumer hardware right now.
AR and VR are still in the implementation stage, so they will become one of the mobile app future trends shortly.
As of February 2022, there were 552 apps identified with the metaverse, of which about 23% were AR & VR ones. Now the number of such solutions is growing.
For example, Google Lens uses AR for real-world object recognition through smartphone cameras. IKEA Place, in turn, lets consumers visualize furniture in their homes before buying. Wanna Kicks enhances online shopping experiences with an AR feature for trying on sneakers virtually.
In the wearables trend we just discussed, we already mentioned the efforts of Apple Vision Pro. Analysts suggest that Apple shipped 350,000 devices in 2024, and up to 1.48 million in 2025. AR & VR apps for Apple Vision Pro and future versions will also become trendy.
Touchless options have already proven their value in 2020 at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their primary goal was to enable retail stores and offices to operate contactless. Thus, the world saw hundreds of technologies for remote access, document signing, and purchases using voice and gestures. But, in 2026, touchless technologies will be one of the hottest trends in mobile app development.
Touchless user interface (UI) options also include:
One example that we are all familiar with is biometrics access to the app. In most cases, it’s automatically supported by your smartphone, such as FaceID (facial recognition) or TouchID (fingerprint). Financial, document, or password storage apps use these features for security.
There are many biometric authentication apps with advanced features on the market today. For example, Duo Security by Cisco, or Keyless Authenticator. However, including biometric access in software that isn’t primarily focused on security is a new app trend.
There is a newer approach, gesture control. The technology has transformed the way we interact with our mobile devices. Smartphones can now recognize and interpret specific hand or body movements as commands by using sensors and cameras. This technology works by capturing motion in three dimensions. It analyzes gestures’ trajectory, speed, and shape against predefined patterns to execute commands within an app.
For example, Samsung’s Galaxy models support the Air action feature, where you can gesture with the S Pen to open apps, control music, and more. The company also launched Gesture Interaction for Smart TVs.
Eye tracking is a new app technology among contactless interface options. It uses state-of-the-art cameras and infrared sensors to track where and for how long the user is looking at the screen. This information is then used to control or adapt the app based on the user’s gaze. The technology assesses the pupil position and corneal reflection to pinpoint the user’s point of focus on the screen.
For example, Lumen uses this technology to turn standard webcams into eye-tracking tools. This allows them to conduct in-depth attention studies around the world. Their method combines eye tracking with face coding to optimize the impact of advertising and packaging.
Meanwhile, Tobii offers eye control for apps, using glasses. It is suitable for research, healthcare, education, and AR apps. They are also a great solution for people with disabilities.
Voice user interfaces are not only about the popular voice assistants Siri and Alexa. Still, they were the start of the function’s adoption. For example, PayPal has been enabling voice-activated payments via Siri since 2016. H&M, Starbucks, and American Express also implemented a similar function for quick searches or repeated payments. However, in 2026, the integration of VUIs will become one of the new mobile app development trends.
Voice interfaces allow users to interact with software using voice commands. Employing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, VUIs can understand, interpret, and respond to user queries with high accuracy. AI has also made a great input into this. This technology converts speech into text, analyzes it, and performs the appropriate action in the app.
VUI is a good option for home automation, gaming, accessibility features, and on-the-go tasks. However, it can also perform in niche applications, such as healthcare. In 2026, voice is increasingly how people trigger the agent behavior we looked at earlier, where a spoken request starts an action inside the app.
Now let’s talk about the IoT as one of the mobile technology trends. Based on Statista reports, the total size of the global Internet of Things market in 2025 was about $419.8 billion. The forecast suggests that it will grow to over $908 billion in 2034. IoT apps generate 40% of this.
Overall, there were 21.1 billion active connected IoT devices worldwide in 2025, 14% more than the year before, and the count is heading for 39 billion by 2030. The IoT is popular in the industrial, smart city, and home technologies, automotive, and agriculture sectors.
Mobile apps are the interface for IoT devices. They provide direct interaction with gadgets and systems in various sectors. With their help, users can manage smart home settings, receive notifications, or check farming data. In fact, it is an advanced automation and user experience personalization in the IoT area.
A great example is Blynk. It is a no-code app builder where you can prototype, deploy, and manage connected electronic devices. This IoT app allows you to remotely control, receive real-time notifications, create automation, and interact with voice assistants.
Low-code platforms simplify development by enabling users to create apps with limited or no coding. These tools use visual interfaces with drag-and-drop features. So, it makes app development accessible to non-technical users. This approach is one of the mobile app trends, that allow faster creation and deployment.
Among these innovations, DhiWise’s Figma to HTML feature stands out by letting users transform Figma designs directly into responsive HTML code. This streamlines the design-to-development workflow, enhancing productivity for developers and designers alike.
Gartner projected the low-code market would reach $44.5 billion by 2026, growing around 19% a year. It also expected that by 2026, developers from outside formal IT would make up at least 80% of low-code users, up from 60% in 2021.
One useful example is Power Apps by Microsoft. This tool uses the Microsoft PowerFx low-code programming language and also allows AI development. Users can build an app from scratch with prompts or let the AI generate an app from images or Figma files. The tool offers prebuilt templates and drag-and-drop functionality. Power Apps is popular for use in finance, marketing, HR, and operations.
The bigger change since the drag-and-drop era is that natural-language builders now produce a working app from a written description in minutes. Users can type instructions in plain English, and the AI automatically generates the frontend layout, designs database schemas, wires up backend logic, and deploys the working application online.
On-demand apps are mobile platforms that provide instant access to various services. For example, food delivery or home services. They connect consumers with providers, offering speed and simplicity. On-demand apps continue to be one of the mobile application trends in 2026.
The largest on-demand category is online marketplaces. The top 3 players in the US market alone (Amazon, eBay, and Etsy) generate $158.3 billion in net profit. Let’s look at this market in more detail:
Among small and medium-sized businesses on Amazon, more than a third (35%) sell in the Home and Kitchen category. Besides, 26% of sellers operate in the Beauty and Personal Care category.
Transportation has been one of the mobile app trends since 2020 and continues to grow. The global car-sharing market will be worth about $226 billion in 2028. The number of users is expected to reach 1.97 billion. Uber and Lyft lead the transportation app industry in the US, while DiDi leads in China. Let’s take a closer look.
The United States generated an estimated $432 billion in online food delivery revenue in 2025, with over $100 billion of that coming from the meal delivery segment alone. Online food delivery apps also owe their popularity to the Covid-19 pandemic. Here are some facts about this market:
Besides these 3 categories of on-demand services, home, freelance, and health and sports apps also gain popularity. When choosing one, users prefer the speed and quality. As Temu’s example shows, developers have the opportunity to build a trendy mobile app that wins even in a highly competitive market.
Digital banking is one of the latest app trends that both traditional companies and neobanks are adapting to. The phone has already become the default way in. Almost half of banked households used mobile banking as their primary way of reaching their account in 2023, a nearly ninefold rise across the decade, while use of bank tellers fell by more than half.
As of the first quarter of 2026, Capital One Mobile was the most downloaded mobile banking app in the United States at approximately 2.92 million downloads, with OnePay third at around 2.5 million.
Neobanks continue to challenge traditional banks, and the trend is global. There are 462 of these services created since 2014, with Chime in the US and Nubank in Brazil among the best known.
Moreover, the trend of digital banking apps is global. There are 462 of these services created since 2014. In Brazil, it is Nubank with approximately $3.9 billion in revenue. Japanese digital bank Rakuten had 136.3 million customers worldwide in 2023. In the UK, Starling Bank has 160 thousand downloads.
38% of people switch to digital banking because of lower fees. 37.1% – due to faster money transfers. Among the most popular features of mobile banking are detecting breaches and receiving notifications of unusual account activity.
The global mobile cloud market will reach $202.4 billion by 2028. The average annual growth rate will be 34.0%. Wireless technologies development, cloud computing, and 5G adoption are driving this growth. The market includes apps for entertainment, utilities, education, and healthcare.
Cloud technologies enable software to run faster. They offer storage solutions that increase app performance and improve customer experience. Cloud-based technologies like VoIP phone service, call centers, and chatbots are a must-have for any business looking to enhance their customer relationships. This way, users can access services and data from any device, anywhere, anytime. Moreover, the mobile cloud integration enables real-time data analytics, machine learning, and AI features.
In fact, 94% of businesses are already using cloud solutions. Moreover, most organizations now run on more than one provider. 89% use multiple clouds, and 73% run a hybrid setup. Thus, developers are taking advantage of cloud and hybrid solutions more and more, making it one of the mobile app trends in 2026.
Let’s take a look at some well-known examples of cloud-based mobile apps.
Salesforce
Business
CRM, sales tracking, marketing automation, real-time analytics
Google Workspace apps
Productivity
Collaborative editing, cloud storage, communication tools
Dropbox
File Storage
File syncing, sharing, collaboration tools, backup
Zoom
Meeting/Messaging
Video conferencing, screen sharing, real-time messaging, virtual backgrounds
Chime
Banking
Fee-free banking, automatic savings, early paycheck access
Google Photos
Photos and Video Sharing
Unlimited storage, photo and video backup, smart categorization
Apple Smart Home
Smart Home
Control and automate lights, locks, thermostats, and more with Apple's HomeKit ecosystem
Fitbit
Sport, Health
Activity tracking, sleep monitoring, workout logging, nutrition planning
Steam Link
Gaming
Game streaming from PC to mobile, multi-platform support, controller support
Focusing on video features has become an important mobile app trend. It is transforming the way we communicate, interact, and consume content on our devices. This trend includes the rise of video-conferencing apps and audio-centric social media platforms.
With the vast usage of video content, there is a need for solutions that provide powerful tools for trimming, enhancing, and adding effects to videos. With an AI video generator you can transform text, images, and simple video clips into polished, engaging videos with minimal user input. This technology is revolutionizing content production by making it faster and more efficient, allowing users to create professional-quality videos for marketing, education, entertainment, and more without needing extensive video editing skills.
The global shift to remote work and virtual meetings has increased the demand for video conferencing apps. In 2022, the global video conferencing market reached $10.6 billion. The market is forecast to nearly double by 2027, rising to $19.1 billion. These platforms have become essential tools for businesses, schools, and individuals.
Although they peaked in 2020, they are still popular. For example, in the 3rd quarter of 2025, users downloaded Zoom more than 35 million times worldwide.
These programs are constantly evolving, adding new features. For example, Zoom AI Companion allows you to generate a meeting summary and get feedback on presentation skills.
There are many popular video-based social networks, such as YouTube and TikTok. But newcomers are also attacking the streaming entertainment space.
Overall, videos reach over 92% of people worldwide. With such widespread viewership, companies compete to offer new video features to attract users.
That’s it; we hope our overview provided a clear picture of mobile app trends to watch in 2026. All in all, AI is taking the largest share of the app market growth. 40% of enterprise applications will carry task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026. Apple and Google now both let an app call a model that runs on the phone, which lowers the cost of an AI feature and keeps user data off a server.
Networks and devices are moving the same way. 5G subscriptions are set to more than double to 6.4 billion by 2031, and connected IoT devices are set to reach 39 billion by 2030. For the future of mobile app development, the statistics suggest AI features will be standard in every app.
If you still have some questions on mobile app trends or how to use them in your development efforts, feel free to reach out. Our expert mobile developers will help you navigate the fast-moving market and adapt the latest mobile app trends for your projects.
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REQUEST CVSAI moving onto the device itself. Apple’s Foundation Models framework lets an app call the on-device model behind Apple Intelligence directly from Swift, and Android’s ML Kit GenAI APIs run summarisation, proofreading, rewriting and image description locally on the phone.
AI and machine learning, IoT, AR & VR, low-code platforms, and cloud computing. Each of these technologies is frequently updated and provides new opportunities for mobile app development.
Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android remain the native defaults. For cross-platform work, Flutter and React Native lead, with Kotlin Multiplatform increasingly used to share business logic while each platform keeps its own native interface. Ionic and .NET MAUI cover the web-technology and C# routes respectively.
