New Decade. New Thinking - The 10 Mobile Product Tools You Need To Be Using Beyond 2020
The number of tools that help us bring mobile products to life is both amazing and staggering. With an incredibly saturated market, and new tools being introduced everyday, we decided to poll our team to determine the 10 best tools you need to be using in the new decade. What you’ll find is that these tools not only do what they’re supposed to do the best, but they unlock solutions for potential problems that have yet to be discovered. They are leaders in their field, and passionate about solving problems beyond 2020.
InVision
InVision is arguably the world’s leading design and collaboration platform. We’ve used InVision countless times for bringing our ideas to wireframe, and then bringing our wireframes to life. Rapid prototyping, platform agnostic, and seamless collaboration places InVision as one of our “must have” for any app development project. But here’s why InVision is crucial in the next decade: they’re solving for bigger, future problems such as reusable components and designing for scale, by investing and educating in design systems.
Segment
Segment is leading the data infrastructure decade of the ‘20s. One of the few customer data infrastructure tools that is a central source for all analytics. Segment seamlessly brings together an ecosystem of 200 integrations (and growing!) for your app. What we like most about Segment is how easy it is to get started with a new tool and not worry about integration, documentation, and passing through data. Segment makes it easy for our clients to track sessions, user flows, hypothesize a strategy, launch a new tool, and see results in a matter of days.
Visual Studio App Center
Microsoft continues to contribute to the software development community with Visual Studio App Center, one of the leading tools that automates the mobile devops process. Because of its ease of use, App Center has become our mobile app distribution tool of choice. Thinking ahead, what we love is how App Center allows us to not only test and distribute, but build off of GitHub - all in a secure cloud environment.
GitHub
Everyone’s favorite version control system, Git has long been the tried, tested, and true tool of choice for developers. What we love most about Git is the performance. Commits, branching, rebasing, merging, and version control are all optimized for speed, leaving very little imprint. Thinking into the future, Git continues to grow with the advent of GitHub Actions - an API for cause and effect. We’re particularly excited about the creation of multiple workflows across any operating system.
Swrve
Swrve is taking charge of real-time relevance and customer interactions in the new decade. App ecosystems are filled with data. Often companies spend more time analyzing data than acting on it. What our product team loves about Swrve is how effectively you can reach the right people, with the perfect message, at a relevant time, based on personalization and activity. As the new decade creates new customer journeys, we are confident that Swrve will be at the forefront of user touchpoints.
AppsFlyer
One of the premier platform agnostic mobile analytic tools, AppsFlyer is simple to implement and extremely user friendly. Product and marketing teams love AppsFlyer because of the robust reporting capability which displays crucial attribution and user analytics data including install data, loyal users, acquisition trends, revenue, and in-app events. What excites us beyond 2020 about AppsFlyer is their deep commitment to security and privacy. AppsFlyer acknowledges security and privacy is mission critical to their existence. Not only are they one of the most compliant companies in their industry, but they challenge their clients to that standard as well.
BugSnag
BugSnag is changing the way developers think, with the core belief that not all bugs are worth fixing right away. Using stability scores and application health, they place emphasis on prioritization. What we love most about BugSnag is that it helps us determine whether to place resources on building or debugging errors by the use of VIP segments and further insight into bugs. What may feel like a rather simple tool actually has the power to create waves in the development process, and that’s what we’re excited about in the coming future. With BugSnag, development teams are able to better understand builds post deploy, and create a process that creates the most value for their customers.
LaunchDarkly
LaunchDarkly is on a mission to decouple feature launch and code deployment. They are helping launch new or risky features by the use of feature tags. What we love most about LaunchDarkly the single feature flags that work cross platform. As developers, we continue to work on core product improvements without the added pressure of including new feature deployments. Business users are then able to toggle features on and off at their own leisure, and are able to relay findings back to the technical team. In the new decade, we believe this relationship will need to be symbiotic more than ever.
Zeplin
In an economy where time is money, Zeplin is the ultimate handoff collaboration tool between designers and developers. What we love most about it is the effortless communication in handoff and the precise attention to detail. As developers, we get an immediate idea of the spacing, font sizes, colours required on each page. Any asset on a page can be tagged and attached. As Zeplin continues ease handoff between teams, and ramp up its collaboration ecosystem, we see it saving us and our clients a lot of time and money.
CircleCI
CircleCI is a champion of continuous integration, which is a necessity for digital transformation. We love CircleCI because it works best for teams who are constantly pushing code. CircleCI runs to ensure a proper build, and can deploy to dev, staging, and production environments. It also works seamlessly with GitHub and Docker. As enterprises continue to ramp up their digital transformation initiatives in 2020, we see CircleCI as a mission critical tool for the future.
