Mobile App Architecture Trends to Watch in 2025

The mobile app industry is on the move. With the advancement of technology, user expectation changes, companies need to be competitive, and app architecture needs to change rapidly. By 2025, we’re heading into some interesting mobile app architecture trends that developers and businesses will want to watch.

In this article, we will dive deeper into the most important mobile app architecture trends that are likely to gain more traction by 2025:

Let’s look at each of these key trends in more detail:

Migration to Microservices

Monolithic mobile architecture has been the traditional approach for developing mobile apps – where all app functions are combined by custom software architecture services into a single, unified app. At the same time, this setup is not scalable or flexible.

An app that follows microservices architecture is broken down into multiple smaller, independent services. Microservices are each designed to do one thing really well.

According to Gartner, more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2027 Developers are finding microservices better suited for modern app environments.

Moving to microservices brings in the benefits of easy scaling, faster updates, decentralized data management, and avoiding a single point of failure. With the increasing complexity of mobile apps, adoption of the microservices approach will be critical. This allows for easier feature additions and faster testing and deployment and reduces our overall resilience.

Adoption of Progressive Web Apps

By 2025, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) will be an important part of mobile strategy. It gives you an app-like experience on the mobile web without downloads or updates.

According to DEV Community, PWAs offer conversion rates 50% higher compared to websites. Their install sizes are also smaller than native apps. Attractive capabilities like push notifications, native background sync, shortcuts, and also offline access are among those accelerating PWA adoption.

Already existing PWAs are being implemented, powering leading apps like Twitter Lite, Pinterest, Uber, and Flipkart. Low development costs and ease of maintenance will allow more mobile apps to add support for PWAs going forward. It provides a chance to serve more users without relying on a certain platform.

Shift toward Event-Driven Architecture

The events drive the mobile app architecture diagram of event-driven architecture and are responsible for triggering and communicating between decoupled services. It enables real-time coordination between app components and an efficient data exchange.

Instead of pointing to the point, components react to state change by emitting events. Also, there are other components, like listening to relevant events and logically interpreting them when needed. This architecture offers scalability, flexibility and performance.

In the era of real-time engagement, event-driven patterns can be used to make mobile apps more responsive. It allows greater adaptability to capture events from disparate sources across mobile channels.

Rise of ‘Composable Architecture’

As microservices gain wider adoption, mobile apps will continue moving towards building modular components that are reusable, loosely coupled and platform agnostic. Composable app architecture design is about creating interoperable building blocks that can evolve with changing digital environments.

By using this approach, mobile apps can compose components more flexibly based on the user journeys they support. This also avoids vendor or technology lock-ins, allowing you to swap in/out app functions or enhance them without affecting other parts.

Forrester predicts composable systems will become 15-20% of new enterprise apps by 2025. As composability matures, mobile apps stand to benefit in terms of lower rework, faster experimentation and streamlined CI/CD.

Increasing Use of Machine Learning

Today’s mobile apps thrive on personalization – understanding user behavior and responding intelligently. Real-time predictive insights for the app capabilities are key and are enabled by machine learning.

A study by Microsoft shows that 54% of mobile apps will have AI integration by 2025. Running ML algorithms locally on devices will allow apps to become smarter and highly contextual but also not impair user privacy.

Areas where on-device ML will impact mobile apps include – personalized recommendations, predictive search, speech recognition, vision capabilities, sentiment analysis and multi-lingual support. 5G connectivity and improvements in on-device processing power will accelerate the incorporation of more mobile apps into ML.

Leveraging 5G Capabilities

As 5G networks expand globally, mobile app architectures will evolve to unlock the potential of new 5G capabilities, such as enhanced throughput, lower latency and network slicing.

Emerging 5G use cases, such as cloud gaming, AR/VR, and autonomous vehicles, require reliable connectivity and responsive networks. This is driving more real-time app interactions to move from the cloud to edge networks. Mobile application architecture will leverage distributed cloud-edge topologies to deliver next-generation experiences.

Additionally, 5G’s network slicing technology will allow app data traffic to be virtually segregated over the 5G infrastructure, depending on specific performance needs. App architectures will be optimized to extract maximum gains from 5G advancements.

Focus on Enhanced Security

Security continues to be the top investment priority for mobile app developers. Data breaches lead to loss of user trust and can cripple app adoption.

App architectures are being updated to address emerging cyber threats. Approaches like ‘zero trust network architecture’ and in-app micro-segmentation are becoming crucial from security and compliance perspectives.

There is increasing focus on adding capabilities like real-time monitoring, data encryption, key management, automated rollbacks etc., into app environments. Cloud-based application protection platforms help secure apps wherever they are deployed.

With apps collecting more and more sensitive user data, robust safeguards and maintaining user confidence are built on security-first mobile enterprise application platform architecture principles.

Accelerating Use of Containers

Containers provide a standard unit of packaging apps with all their dependencies. This helps make apps easy to develop, test and deploy across environments. According to Gartner, over 75% of global organizations will run containerized applications in production by 2025.

Containers make the app delivery workflows more portable and consistent. It also supports seamless app migration to the cloud and auto-scaling of optimal resource utilization.

With businesses looking to release features at a faster pace, containers will be a big enabler for app modernization. Rollouts and updates are predictable across distributed mobile channels, and infrastructure agility is increased without sacrificing security and visibility.

Prominence of Low-Code Development

Low-code platforms help quickly build and iterate mobile apps with minimal hand-coding. They simplify app development by providing visual app composition tools, drag-and-drop interfaces and reusable templates.

According to research firm Gartner, over 65% of app development activity will shift to low-code platforms by 2025. Low-code tools democratize app creation beyond developer teams.

The core idea behind it is that Low Code helps you create the App MVP in an MVP stage with the basic functionality first and then iterate it intensively based on the user feedback. Agile development principles are well aligned with this. Additionally, low code makes it easy to connect apps to current systems and data sources.

Expanding Role of AR/VR

Mobile apps are using immersive technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality to change how users interact with them. The combination of digital and real-world elements offers new ways to visualize information engagingly.

According to IDC, by 2025, world spending on AR/VR solutions will be almost $160 billion. The AR and VR are going to be leveraged by app architectures to increase productivity, collaboration, and hyper-personalization across all industries.

Spatial computing, 3D visualization and headless AR/VR streaming will become specialized cloud services that will be adopted to power next-generation mobile app experiences and 5G networks, on-device ML, and maturing developer tools will fuel rapid innovation in this space.

Conclusion

The rapid development of mobile technology is not going to slow down. For new possibilities, app architectures have to evolve to match the devices and networks.

Microservices, PWAs, event-driven patterns, composability, ML and immersive computing are impacting mobile app design and development. At the same time, 5G, containers, low-code tools and strengthened security measures are transforming app delivery.

Modern mobile application architecture diagrams can be embraced by mobile apps to meet the needs of tomorrow and maintain a consistently high quality of experience across platforms. A future-ready architecture paves the way for mobile innovation and sustainable value creation.