Apps have become a staple of the smartphone era, but what role will they play in the near future?  In its latest report, Expertmaker says wearable tech, better privacy and embedded intelligence are the factors that mobile developers will have to take into account in order to differentiate their apps in the coming years.

“Mobile technology has come a long way in the past few years,” said Lars Hard, founding CTO of Expertmaker. The entrepreneur dropped by at last week’s AnDevCon after having previously been at the Vodafone AI Hackaton. “Mobile devices now have extensive capabilities. In addition to analyzing digital content, mobile devices can harness ambient data such as temperature, location, user movements, schedule, user habits and engagement. Developers need to be able to leverage these new capabilities and sources of data to create more advanced apps.”

The firm, which offers developers a modular artificial intelligence toolset they can incorporate into their software, sees a lot of premise in the kind of technology Google brought into the public eye with Project Glass. Expertmaker considers gadgets that are “worn rather than carried” an opportunity for smarter apps that run on smaller screens.

The second trend the company lists concerns the opt-in applications that usually rely on location data to deliver content.  Expertmaker says that in the future mobile developers will leverage AI in to eliminate the need for this information, eliminating many privacy and security threats.

The third trend follows the same train of thought: the likes of Facebook and Twitter will have to develop better algorithms in order to ensure their users’ data is not misused.

The final trend that the firm lists is AI- and big data-driven customization. The latter is already happening, but not all mobile developers have access to the proper tools – such as artificial intelligence – to make sense of their info.