18 new Web Application Development Trends in 2021

Balvinder Singh
Tekraze
Published in
10 min readAug 5, 2021

From its inception onwards, the internet always remained a reason for the change. Now no one in this world is unaware of its influence in our daily lives, knowingly or unknowingly. Similarly, the impact of websites and web applications too changed the fate of the world largely. Because Starting from desktops to laptops, tablets, and smartphones, people’s way of using websites has changed largely. Web application developers now play a crucial role in the success of any business. Also adopting ways to keep in pace with the changing scenario in web development. The Latest Web Application Development Trends has changed lately from using backend vs frontend technologies with updates

Laptop Showing web Application Development

We have witnessed a very fast-moving growth of the technology industry and the speed with which web applications have taken over cyberspace by storm. As of late, there is no business that can go without an effective web presence and branding to reach customers. Web applications set open the windows to an unprecedented avenue of global revenue alongside spearheading brands.

Let's discuss about new Web Application Development trends in detail

With an unprecedented surge in consumer demands, there are a lot of innovations and strategies when it comes to web development in modern times. It is not an exaggeration if you comment that web applications now rule the cyber world and dictate business domains nowadays. This is the reason why the corporate stay more focused on web application development and the developers stay focused on getting a deeper insight into the latest trends and strategies in web development. Here are a few top web application development trends you need to keep an eye on in 2021.

1. Motion User Interface

An amazing change in terms of web development that is trending now is the use of ‘motion UI,’ which enables the developers to custom create moderate websites by achieving maximum appreciation. A minimalist website may also get a dynamic life with motion UI.

Motion Ui evolved much providing a user interface to create websites or applications with motion UI controls. The trends in motion UI have changed to just simple UI from dynamic and complex UI.

2. Chatbots and AI

Users want to get information quickly and as precisely as possible with no intervention. Here comes the importance of chatbots. A chatbot is a typical artificial intelligence application that can almost achieve anything a human support person can do. A chatbot with help of artificial intelligence can mimic a real user chat experience.

Having a support team in large numbers was a thing of history as customers may require support. But now chatbots help in adding customer support by programming in web application with recorded instructions and links to share to the customer on demand of the customer. Chatbots can connect with social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook.

3. Apps on-demand

The on-demand model is gaining more popularity lately, which also fuels the fast growth of web applications development. Companies nowadays can provide exact copies of apps for private companies by cloning existing apps with new technologies like react saving the time of r&d as they know what to build. So, there is the availability of apps like car booking, food ordering, membership apps on demand for a specific company for their business.

The increasing popularity of open source has helped more custom apps in demand as similar libraries or more over the same libraries are available to use in web application development.

Low code web development

Ensuring rapid innovation, the low-code web development model is gaining largely in popularity lately. This will ensure a faster business by deploying scalable applications. Enterprise applications may get largely benefited from a low-code development model on a larger scale. With low code, you don’t need to learn things you need to know to be a developer.

Low code development is a process where a user can create an application with minimal coding by just interacting with UI tools and only adding some values manually. Like creating a table with dragging and only adding data API to show data. There are a lot of platforms providing low code web development like Gramex, Mendix, Appian, etc.

4. PWA (Progressive web application development)

With the ability to deliver a marvelous user experience and to quickly load, progressive web applications can function without any third-party connections. With this approach, the site owners can ensure optimum user engagement and also conversions with progressive web apps.

PWA’s have resulted in a better and faster user experience over native apps. Some companies saw a 70% growth in customer retention when adopting PWA. As they do not need to be installed, people with low memory phones can access the apps without installing full-fledged applications in the phone; without worrying about full storage.

5. Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Blockchain is proving out to be a happening technology by being effective in the secured data storage without the need for intermediaries to carry out transactions. Blockchain started just as code with a savable history that can be tracked. But it resulted in digital currency opening many opportunities to the world.

Bitcoin is one of the best things people have seen lately with the advancement of blockchain, along with other crypto chains like ethereum, cosmos. Blockchain technology in gaming for buying accessories and power-ups in games has lead to new use and increased adoption rate of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency because of its trackable trait is a very useful currency for games and apps.

6. Single e-com network

Providing a very efficient and flexible web ecosystem to facilitate integration of many online stores, the single e-com network models as followed by an expert digital marketing company will help enhance the functionality of online stores.

Softwares like Woocommerce and Shopify provided users with the opportunity to have customer stores. People liked them very much and as a result, they started their own e-com network where you can purchase a single store directly with all features already built and every integration available at a single place; providing other needs like logistics and shipping.

7. Social selling

By assisting enterprises in generating more business through social media apps and connections, social selling is helping businesses to increase sales by taking the right products to the targeted audience as quickly as possible.

One such feature is Facebook Shop and Instagram Shop, where you can sell directly from social media letting users buy your products directly from social media apps.

8. Push notification

Push notifications technology helped in reducing the communication gap between users of the app and the company. Softwares like one signal notifications helped developers to quickly integrate push notifications in the web application.

Push notifications basically are the pop-up messages in mobile screens as notifications and toasts over desktop. With push notifications, devs can convey important events to users. A push notification can inform about an order, a security issue, notifying users of something important in real-time.

9. Advanced cybersecurity

There may be more innovative modes of protecting networks and data by reducing external threats of any cyber-attacks. With the new web application technologies, there are many libraries and tools that can be integrated into web applications providing cyber security.

Some examples like CDNs help to secure networks by proxying through a secure network as well as avoiding DOS attacks. Firewalls and Spyware network software can help to secure networks over offices. Technologies like 2Factor authentication helped web application developers to integrate the second level of authentication making hacking impossible as it stays for some time only.

10. VR and AR

Virtual reality and augmented reality are fast-growing trends that we have seen empowering easy and more interactive web application development now, helping marketers to get a better hold of the bigger and wider target audience.

Games have been adopting these technologies to improve user experience. Games like Pokemon adding AR have created a craze lately, and other games with VR have helped players to live a life they dream of.

The most promising use of VR and AR is in e-commerce as sites using these to improve customer experience. One example like lenskart allows you to scan your face and try different angles how it looks on your face via the app. Other examples are retail stores in VR where we go virtually and shop online without leaving home.

11. Adaptability

Web applications are now changing in forms and patterns while the users shift from desktops and laptops to smaller gadgets, which paved the way to responsive web development. Now the adaptive web applications have become a standard.

Web applications once code in web technology can be adopted to multi-platforms like Windows, Android, Mac OS, and more using Apis with hardware that was difficult before or less useful.

One nice example is code editors adapted to work on the web as well desktop-like visual studio and Atom, where js is used as a front end technology along with HTML/CSS. Adaptability helps in selecting a mobile platform for development.

12. Interactive Forms

Similar to adaptability, making websites with varying sections and forms may also be the order of the day in web development.

Websites like Typeform have changed the experience of filling up online forms and made it cooler. Forms can be used for creating submission forms, inquiries, and surveys making for more user retention and information collection.

13. Video Backgrounds

Gaining more popularity as a web design trend, to gain more attention to the website. Video content and video backdrops may be largely used in the websites of the coming times.

Having video backgrounds add to the detailing and appeal to the user making the user like the app. This can be the entry point of apps as well landing pages of the web application providing a quick overview of what the user will get after signing up on the web application or mobile app.

14. Lazy loading

There were times when there were lesser sites, so lesser competition. But now even a second difference can make your site appear at the bottom of a search or to the top.

As more people are on mobile and tablets because of the accessibility and easy use without any limitations lazy loading has taken over. Lazy loading started over just delaying image load to save site load time and serve faster, loading remaining images later. But now with the trends, web applications allow lazy load images, scripts, and ads making the performance better. So lazy loading is one of the coolest web development trends of 2021 lately.

15. Predictive analytics

Web apps, not simply utilities anymore. These may become an integral part of the workflow. AI may be used to enhance customer experience, and predictive analytics will be used to define the potential user behavior.

Web applications like food ordering apps can now add ai analysis to show restaurants to users based on history and profiles. One example is Amazon showing products more reasonable to a customer irrespective of other factors increasing the chance of purchase.

Latest we see apps detecting face masks and scanners detecting car details by just numbers and cameras. Predictive analysis with AI and data patterns leads to more sales and productivity making it the future-proof trend for web development in 2022 or maybe 2023.

16. Decentralized Storage and hosting

Decentralized storage is a trend followed for some time and is more used now helping to host data over nodes distributed over geography, majority of public servers of people over a single company. Decentralized storage has helped to build a system using blockchain where a group or community of people provide service to each other.

This type of storage as distributed over public nodes, provide a safe as well censorship-resistant network making it difficult to take down. We have seen people hosting free apps, books, movies for people who can not afford to buy. Some new agencies or blogs sharing true opinions get censored over by agencies like the government and companies. So decentralized storage has helped in this.

There was only Google, AWS, Azure controlling the hosting and storage, but not anymore. There has been a new Open Source Competitor Akash Network which is a decentralized, censorship-free cloud hosting using cryptocurrency providing services at much lower values.

Services like Filebase, Sia Skynet, Storx are also open-source versions of AWS buckets and google cloud stores providing replacement to store files or static sites.

17 .Serverless Apps

There used to be a backend for logic processing but now services like AWS and Skynet providing serverless services which provide APIs to apply business logic instead of managing a backend yourself and hosting the frontend.

Basically, you get managed services like MariaDB for the database, Redis for caching, Kafka for the queue management. Also, creating sites like static portfolio marketing pages, this trend is rising as it reduces maintenance and work required to be done. You can use angular/react build and deploy a static site using serverless services from cloud providers.

Here is an example of resume deployment in React functional language by our founder which can be seen on vercel which provides serverless apps deployment for free.

18. OAuth Services

Back in the days adding social logins was a craze, but adding and keeping them update was difficult and sometimes on the web, not optimized. So software companies like Okta and Keycloak started providing OAuth services, which basically allow anyone to integrate their services providing just API keys from social services like Google, Facebook to integrate one-click social services. This reduces the work required to be done by the developer and maintenance is all handled by the OAuth services provider which regularly checks and updates the APIs from social media providers. This trend is in use by mostly new startups as their challenge is to provide new services to people rather than creating existing services from scratch.

Summary

As we can see, web application development is moving at a faster pace than expected over the last several years. So, the new-age web developers need to keep up pace with these changes. To stay ahead in the competition, it is essential for website owners, web developers, and designers to create competent & user-friendly websites. To stay ahead, it is important to understand the current trends and future possibilities. Modern-day web developers need to learn and implement modular JavaScript components to ensure clean and reusable code. They also need to know how to debug JavaScript. It is also important to discover the possibilities of the latest functional and reactive user interface programming.

The key to success in web application development is to stay as close as possible to the user demand in light of the changing trends in technology. For this, the developers need to equip themselves with modern technology and understand the concepts of build top-performing and result-oriented web applications. Following the trends mentioned above & being open to adapt to the changes in technology. It will help modern-day developers to bring forth winner web applications.

Feel free to share your comments below and let us know which is your favorite trend among these. Keep sharing as sharing is caring and keep visiting back for more.

Originally published at https://tekraze.com/new-web-application-development-trends/

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Balvinder Singh
Tekraze

Open Source FullStack Developer | Blogger | Crypto Enthusiast | Gamer