Crowdbotics App Development Trends Report

In addition to tracking apps by their industry, we also record each app's type, or functional category, to help us understand what problems users are trying to solve by building custom software. App types often require the context of their industry to be properly understood.

For example, social network apps topped this list in 2022. Within the health care industry, a social network might be a platform for patients with shared medical conditions to connect with and support each other. Within the consumer sector, however, a social network app might be a newsfeed app launched to capitalize on the Twitter exodus in Q4.

These two apps might have very similar technical architectures but dramatically different user-facing features, visual styles, and distribution strategies. In other words, they're built mostly the same from a code perspective — their differences are more directly governed by design, branding, and go-to-market strategy than they are by engineering choices. When we say that only 20-30% of an app's code is truly differentiating, this is what we mean.
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There are dozens of simple online store builder platforms available for retailers and content distributors, which is why e-commerce apps built with Crowdbotics tend to serve businesses for whom standard e-commerce platforms are insufficiently robust. These users may require specific operational logic, novel distribution channels, or custom deployment environments that are poorly supported by low-end platforms.

One easy way to think about app types is that they are simply categories of well-known apps that you already use. An appointment scheduler app has high feature overlap with Calendly, a delivery app has high feature overlap with DoorDash, a rideshare app has high feature overlap with Uber, etc. This simple framework helps non-technical Crowdbotics users rapidly scope the project they're trying to build by selecting from these common templates the first time they log in.

As we continue to build out our repository of prebuilt app architectures, we are focused on supporting the most common app types in this list first and then working our way down to increasingly niche use cases.

Crowdbotics supported a remarkable diversity of app types within each of our top 20 industries in 2022. The Crowdbotics platform does not constrain code reuse by vertical, so it's capable of leveraging common technical specs wherever they are relevant.

Look no further than the eye-popping number of different app types within the health care sector in 2022. The top of the list is more or less as expected, with strong representation among appointment scheduling, coaching, and communication (usually interdepartmental or patient-practice communication) apps.

However, because health care is the largest industry in the U.S., you'll also see interesting long-tail examples like game, crypto, rideshare, and even dating apps on this list. These are the edge cases that become viable when employees and entrepreneurs in an industry begin to independently seek out tech solutions to common challenges.

The graph distribution changes quite a bit within our second-most common industry, entertainment, where social network apps dominate. In fact, social network apps for the entertainment and sports industries alone made up 50% of all social network apps we saw in 2022. This speaks to the ongoing influence of the passion economy within an increasingly decentralized media landscape.

Our coverage within the finance industry is remarkable for the variety of meaningful sub-categories supported, including banking, accounting, budgeting, investment, business intelligence, remittance, expense tracking, and stock trading.

Many of these app types have their own dedicated categories within the finance industry, but Crowdbotics users are still building interesting variants and challengers to address the gaps found in branded bank apps, PayPal, Quickbooks, Fidelity, and other leading financial platforms.

Industries and app types can experience pronounced spikes and declines due to macroeconomic changes, hype cycles, and investment trends. In general, overall demand for development within a given industry is not especially volatile compared to the demand for a specific app type within an industry.

As expected, health care held the top spot in each quarter with the exception of Q2, when entertainment boomed amid the return of in-person events.

Consumer apps gradually dropped in the standings each quarter, likely due to growing concerns about the average consumer's buying power amid a possible economic slowdown.

Social network app demand led the way in each quarter until Q4, when the retail industry's high season pushed e-commerce apps to the top of the list.

Q4 saw a much more even distribution of new builds by app type, likely as a result of a broadened range of module coverage within the Crowdbotics platform. The more that our platform can account for commonly shared core features, the easier it is for users to stretch the platform's coverage into edge cases via custom code.

Seasonal effects are only really worth assessing on an industry-by-industry basis, since demand for app types is contextual within those industries. Breaking out quarterly volatility by industry can help us understand how new app development investment flowed in 2022 and potentially identify annual patterns for future seasonality in app development.

Q1-Q2: Surges in transportation, entertainment, and sports heralded the return of in-person events in Q2 following the winter of the Omicron variant. This trend may be less pronounced in 2023 with the waning economic influence of the pandemic. A pullback in marketing app development looks like a one-off trend, but a comparable drop in the fitness sector could easily be explained by the "New Year's Resolution" boom cycle that most gyms enjoy annually.

Q2-Q3: A 100% spike in marketing app demand further suggests that its Q2 decline was a 2022 outlier. Retail and sports investment jumped in Q3, likely in anticipation of the holiday season and the return of several major professional and collegiate sports seasons. This will likely reoccur in 2023.

Q3-Q4: A Q4 boom in non-profit and education app investment reflects the need for these tightly budgeted orgs to use their remaining funds before the calendar flips — this is likely an evergreen trend. Retail and sports quickly reverted to normal levels following their Q3 leaps, which also seems likely to repeat this year.

In this data set, we've ruled out overly small sample sizes to avoid overstating spikes and slowdowns within the listed industries. That said, there were some surprises when it came to industry shifts in app development demand from 2021 to 2022.

2021-2022 Growth by Industry

Human resources led the pack with a 2,500% increase in software development demand from 2021 to 2022. There's a simple explanation for this, which is that unemployment dropped from 6.3% to 3.9% during 2021, leaving HR departments with new headcount to manage and a lack of quality tech to support their efforts. With unemployment basically flat in 2022, we wouldn't project a similar spike from 2022-2023.

We're generally encouraged to see that demand for app development increased in 2022 within industries that are historically slow to invest in software, such as non-profit, agriculture, and government. We'll expect more of these industries to show up in 2023, as legacy sectors are the worst-served industries by existing low-code and digital transformation solutions.

Finally, it will surprise nobody that crypto saw a 650% boost on the back of its Q1 2022 hype cycle. It likely would have topped this list if it had maintained its pace throughout the rest of 2022.

2021-2022 Slowdowns by Industry

As a startup that enjoyed rapid growth in 2022, we were fortunate enough not to see reductions in demand in any industries from 2021-2022. However, some sectors did grow more slowly than others.

Although they were in high demand overall throughout 2022, consumer, finance, and real estate didn't make much of a leap over their 2021 levels, indicating that they may be evergreen presences in this report.

As with our 2021-2022 industry data, we've omitted overly small sample sizes to keep this analysis representative of actual market trends.

2021-2022 Growth by App Type

The biggest story in the 2021-2022 data by far is the 4,400% spike in coaching apps. These apps can broadly be categorized as apps that enable domain experts to share instructional content directly with their audiences.

The use cases for a coaching app are surprisingly diverse. A corporate team may want to build a sales training course for new hires. A health and wellness coach may want to build diet and exercise regimens for users. A consultancy may want to digitize the delivery of their core programs for achieving organizational excellence.

This demand for coaching apps arises from the intersection of two prevailing forces: the lack of a dominant platform in this category, and the revenue growth opportunities that experts can unlock by migrating their customers into an owned ecosystem. It is unlikely that either of these forces will diminish in 2023, so we expect similar demand this year.

2021-2022 Slowdowns by App Type

As with industries, none of our app types actually contracted in demand in 2022. The slowest-growing app types did grow more slowly than the slowest-growing industries, likely due to the large pool of app types that can be built with Crowdbotics.

The primary trend represented in the data is the decreased demand for apps that already have category leaders: budgeting, project management, IDEs, stock trading, and file sharing all have high-quality options available in the market, many of which have free tiers. This both reduces the likelihood that businesses will need a custom solution for these challenges and discourages them from taking on the dominant apps in these categories with their own app ideas.