Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

The amount of time spent on mobile apps has increased by 21% from 2014 to 2015, with the mobile app market being worth an estimated $58 billion. That amount will rise to $77 billion by 2017, according to research conducted this year. But it’s not the mobile apps themselves that generate all this money – it’s the services behind them.

At the dawn of the app store gold rush – as the media affectionately calls it – apps were low in numbers and simplistic: reminders, photography, note taking, doodling apps, match-three games etc. As time progressed, not only were there more apps to be found, but their complexity grew as well, and so did the hardware they ran on. Their numbers grew from mere thousands to billions, as more developers started leveraging newer, more advanced technology, but also another game changer