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4 Game-Changing Trends in Web App Design

Web applications are one of the greatest revelations of the Internet. It’s a development that is largely specific to the Web 2.0 era, but their significance will be in effect for generations.

The web app is a signifier of a fundamental shift in computing. It’s representative of the cloud and our newfound ability to decentralize our technical lives and spread ourselves across desktop computers, mobile devices and pretty much anything else connected to the Internet.

But web apps are driven by trends, and trends move fast. So if you’re slaving away on a mobile app, here are four trends that you might want to consider before coding yourself into irrelevance.

1. Location

It’s not that location started with Foursquare, but it took Foursquare’s simple badge system to make the world pay attention. If your web app isn’t location aware, people are far less likely to be aware of it. With web juggernauts like Facebook launching Places and Google shifting product rockstar Marissa Mayer to location and local services, it’s safe to bet on geolocation.

These days, it’s easier than ever to to make your app location aware. HTML5 features a native location protocol (try finding yourself with an HTML5-compliant browser), and with a few easy lines of JavaScript, your app can be pegging latitudes and longitudes in no time. And, according to SimpleGeo’s Andrew Mager, HTML5’s location protocol is doubly useful for mobile web apps, because it doesn’t hog battery resources by constantly running GPS.

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