The past year has been a complicated year for the software industry. From introducing products such as GPT3 to many layoffs that the tech industry faced.

The global software products market grew from $1,141.43 billion in 2021 to $1,304.74 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3%.

But overall, what were the most prominent trends in the industry in the past year, and what is projected to continue in the future?

Let us take a moment to review the most significant events that occurred in the last year and try to recall their outcomes.

Growth of IoB(Internet of Behavior)

The Internet of Things has been extended to the Internet of Behaviours (IoB), where data is collected from multiple connected devices to get valuable insights into customer interests, behaviors, and preferences. IoB helps collect, comprehend, evaluate, and assemble human behavior of all types. 

The global internet of behaviors (IoB) market size was exhibited at USD 472.91 billion in 2022 and is expected to touch around USD 2,143.57 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 20.79% during the forecast period 2022 to 2030.

While IoB has yet to gain mainstream traction, Gartner predicted that 40% of the worldwide population will have their behaviors tracked by 2023. The data gathered via IoB is useful for creating a personalized user experience.

AR and VR in the scene

The Global Augmented reality and virtual reality market in the current year (2022) have a market size of USD 37.0 billion and can reach up to USD 114.5 billion by 2027, the end of 5 year forecast period at a market growth of 25.3% rate.

With the increasing adoption of AR technology into daily life, the number of businesses integrating it into their services is expected to increase significantly in the coming years.

• According to statistics, 34% of customers already use AR technology while shopping, and nearly half (47%) of them like to use it online and in-store.
• 63% of customers say that Augmented Reality would improve their shopping experience.

The uprising of the low-code and no-code

The idea of building apps with little or no coding involved has gained traction in recent years. 45% of businesses favor low-code development as it reduces dependency on skilled experts. 

The market size is expected to rise from  USD 25.16 billion in 2022 to USD 94.75 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 31.6% during the forecast period.

More outsourcing

Outsourcing of IT services was also among the trends in 2022, and it saw a significant increase.

Globally, outsourcing spending is predicted to reach $731 billion in 2023. IT outsourcing spending could increase by 22% over 2019's to reach $519 billion in 2023. 

Outsourcing allows startup owners to tap into proven skills and experience without being burdened by salaries and IT costs. Also, outsourcing is better than hiring freelancers if the startup founder isn't ready to take on the CTO role.

Edge computing

Statistics show that edge computing is predicted to rise 28 times from 2018 to 2025. We've already seen some of that happening — but the future holds many more opportunities for edge networks.

According to Statista, AR, VR, and MR market will be worth 250 billion dollars by 2028. The solutions are already distributed to the mass market, entering healthcare, transportation, education, retail, finance, and many other industries. 

JavaScript: The most used language in 2022

JavaScript continues to reign supreme, and Python held steady in second place over the past year largely due to its versatility in everything from development to education to machine learning and data science.

TypeScript also held firm in fourth place year-over-year. Notably, PHP dropped from sixth to seventh place in 2022.

Layoffs

Over recent months, tech companies have been laying workers off by the thousands. It is estimated that in 2022 alone, over 120,000 people have been dismissed from their job at some of the biggest players in tech – Meta, Amazon, Netflix- and smaller firms and starts ups as well. There are several reasons why these layoffs happened; Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer states that most of these layoffs are "Imitative behavior," meaning that actually there's "no reason." Just because others(Such as Twitter and the deal with Elon musk, Meta because of its stock, etc.) are doing it, many other tech companies are doing it, but these actions will not influence a better act on their approach.

Others believe that these layoffs are the result of economic issues or even AI replacing people, which could continue in 2023.

Opening up Copilot

Finally, on June 21, 2022, GitHub announced that Copilot was out of "technical preview" and is available as a subscription-based service for individual developers.

When you type code or comments, GitHub Copilot suggests the next line of code. But it’s not only a single word or line of code. GitHub Copilot can suggest complete methods, boilerplate code, whole unit tests, and even complex algorithms.

Open AI 

In 2022, Open AI opened the Dall-E 2 to the public, and many people could actually use this giant product to produce new images from scratch. Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, states: "they really learned a lot from Dall-E operations." 

Open AI also launched ChatGPT, one of the most important products introduced this year. You can also read more about ChatGPT in the article: "Stop worrying about the content; AI is here."

Conclusion

Although there may have been many other trends in the past year, it was a truly unique one. There's no question that the software industry was also affected by the Russia-Ukraine war, the end of the covid, and also the recession in many countries.

But what is probably clear is that we will see more artificial intelligence in the following years, and we may have a long road ahead to see humans' real success.