Tomorrow’s apps will be like having a virtual assistant by your side. They won’t just make you more productive with your work, they’ll actually do some of the work for you. For example, in the medical field, we’ll see apps for disease management, patient records, and remote diagnostics. The app will be more like an essential tool to perform a specific function rather than an ancillary item.

Aside from the app itself, the future of apps is also about where that app will be used. With Apple’s launch of the iPad and soon competing smart pads by other manufacturers, apps are already finding new homes outside of the phone. Some smart-phone apps are compatible with smart pads. But even those companies aren’t thinking big enough, both literally and figuratively.

Since smart pads have bigger screens and more processing power, why should they do the same thing as the phone app? Why not take advantage of that extra space and power and come up with a new class of apps that can do things the phone apps can’t? Companies must think about these key questions and address them if they want to be serious players in the future app market.

But that’s just the beginning. The next evolution is apps for the television. Today’s newer televisions are Internet enabled. (By the way, all of our devices will be Internet enabled one day.) The processor and the television browser are built into the TV set, so you don’t have to plug a computer into your television. The TV is the computer.

With this comes the wide-scale use of Internet protocol television (IPTV). It’s essentially TV over the Internet instead of on cable and satellite. In fact, many millennials use IPTV service for all of their television viewing rather than cable or satellite. Knowing this, it’s only logical that we’ll see apps for TV. Some new models already have them—television-level apps.

Flat-panel displays provide even more visual real estate and will most likely have faster processors. Many new televisions are also 3D equipped, meaning your apps will be 3D too. In the app world, this is a game changer. Smart companies need to stay ahead of this evolution and create their apps accordingly.

Stake Your Claim

If you look at the types of apps currently available in the app stores, you can see that most of the companies developing apps don’t see the future of apps. These companies are creating simplistic and basic apps that don’t account for future needs. They certainly aren’t enterprise-level apps.

In fact, if you look for business apps in iTunes, the largest app store, you’ll find numerous apps for such things as document scanning, creating to-do lists, and document sharing. Such apps are so common that some could argue they’re commodities. Standing out in the business world requires you to be more than a commodity, though. You need to be a unique solutions provider. Tomorrow’s apps will do precisely that.

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