Custom App Development Trends in the UK in 2026

The state of custom mobile app development in the UK

Understanding where the UK stands in app development helps businesses benchmark their digital initiatives against market standards and identify opportunities for competitive advantage through bespoke solutions. That’s what a vetted mobile app development company in the UK does.

The type of custom engineering work has changed because five years ago, companies needed simple mobile applications, but nowadays, they look for a custom app development company in the UK in order to receive integrated systems that work in conjunction with warehouse software, accounting tools, CRM solutions, and consumer databases.

Custom applications are tailored to a particular business process but incur much higher implementation costs in comparison to off-the-shelf applications and also take longer integration schedules.

Market growth and shifting user expectations

The UK app development sector has been estimated to be worth approximately £28.3 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow at a CAGR rate of 12% each year until 2030. The mobile commerce sector of the UK retail industry continues to rise in terms of contribution to total sales.

UK app downloads continue growing, with AI-powered applications showing particular momentum. ChatGPT ranked among the most downloaded apps in early 2025, reflecting strong consumer interest in AI capabilities.

Although growth offers opportunities, companies need to separate the overall boom in the number of mobile applications available in the market and their own requirement to develop solutions that meet their objectives rather than trend along the existing tendencies.

Below are the requirements for various industries that will influence the market in the year 2026, compiled by our custom app development firm.

Sector-specific demand

Various industries in the UK face their own challenges, which affect the extent to which custom development brings a notable advantage over off-the-shelf solutions.

• Healthcare: Private sector vendors look for app developers for hire to allow their clients to benefit from telemedicine services. VR applications include medical training.
• Finance: Monzo currently has the largest number of users in the UK neobank market at 14 million, followed by Revolut at 10.5 million British clients. The growth of digital banks forced the traditional banking sector to improve their applications by partnering with experienced custom mobile app development companies.
• Retail: The mobile shopping phenomenon has affected marketplaces too. The established retail players, such as ASOS and M&S, have incorporated AR functionality to enable virtual try-on, but this is in its early stage.
• Government: The GOV.UK app launched in July 2025, gaining approximately 260,000 downloads in five months. With GOV.UK receiving over 60% monthly visits from mobile, the government’s mobile strategy reflects broader digital service improvement efforts.

The UK’s particularly advanced fintech and healthcare sectors show how regional strengths can accelerate custom feature integration.

Why do UK businesses prefer bespoke app development?

The UK is experiencing a rise in the development of custom applications due to the fact that in some cases, off-the-shelf applications are unable to satisfy their respective work processes. The following are the reasons for the choice of custom app development in the UK:

• Highly aligned processes. Custom applications are designed based on the way your business processes actually work, thereby not requiring you to mould your processes to fit the software application.

  For example, John Lewis has a custom eCommerce platform that monitors their products and consumer behaviours both in the offline and online space.

• Differentiation through competition. Through custom mobile app development for startups, newly established companies receive unique functionalities that competitors, who ordinarily utilise standardised platforms, cannot offer.

  For instance, Argos changed their market through multichannel platform comprising the website and the in-store system.

• Full system integration. The business is able to interface their customised tools with their existing CRM, accounting, and inventory systems.

  The NHS App (launched 2018, major update 2022) integrates with GP systems, hospital records, and prescription services. By Q4 2024, it served 35M registered users, handled 15M+ monthly active sessions, and saved an estimated £47M in admin costs by enabling digital appointment booking and repeat prescriptions (Source: NHS Digital Performance Report 2024).

• Scalability with no constraints. The applications will grow alongside the expansion of your business operations.

  The UK’s largest NHS trust, Barts Health NHS Trust, ordered a bespoke eCPD app that is meant to scale along with their employees.

With that being said, it’s obvious that off-the-shelf solutions can help when you need to launch quickly and have a limited budget, but when it comes to long-term operations, such tools lose in terms of scalability and integration.

Key custom app development trends in the UK

The trends in custom app engineering in the UK are mainly global and less UK-specific, but the rapid adoption levels streamline these tendencies here.

Most of the trends tend to target medium and large-scale businesses and less target small organisations where simpler methods are more feasible and effective.

AI and Gen AI adoption

Generative AI brings new dimensions to the table.

• conversational interfaces
• sentiment analysis
• predictive maintenance
• real-time personalisation

For example, Ocado’s custom warehouse app uses computer vision AI for inventory management, achieving 99.1% picking accuracy—industry leading in the UK grocery sector.

A custom app development company that delivers AI solutions codes faster in some instances by 10% to 30% but deliverables need human supervision. Nonetheless, the concern of many organisations regarding AI errors, the biggest challenge is data privacy. Also, according to Gartner, 62% of companies have been attacked by deepfakes in the last 12 months, which cannot be overlooked.

Cloud-native and serverless

Approximately 50% of enterprises will use cloud services by 2028. It is a global trend equally prevalent in the UK market. Serverless architecture eliminates infrastructure management, with developers writing code while providers handle scaling and maintenance.

In a blog post summarising a report by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), AWS cites potential savings “up to 66%” in compute, “66% lower cost of networking”, and “69% lower cost of storage” compared to on-premises infrastructure.

Composable architecture

Composable architecture involves decomposing applications into loosely coupled services that interconnect via APIs. The services are designed to be worked on and scaled separately. This allows for:

• parallel development
• rapid evolution
• easier testing
• replacement of functionality.

This architecture pattern will be most applicable to large enterprises that handle complex applications with teams of developers. For SMEs and smaller apps, the costs associated with added architectural complexities will overshadow any advantages that come with this pattern.

It will be less likely for a retail business to implement a composable architecture when developing a customer app since a retail custom mobile app design and development will be fine with a monolithic application architecture pattern.

Low-code and cross-platform growth

Cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native allow a cross-platform app development company to deliver a single codebase for both iOS and Android. With the UK market split nearly evenly (50.07% Android, 49.44% iOS), this approach can roughly halve development costs compared to building separate native apps.

The drawbacks include the lack of access to platform-specific capabilities and possible shortcomings in performance, but in most business operations, the drawbacks are acceptable.

AR/VR

Custom app development services in the medical sector include VR in surgical training in specialised medical facilities. The retail sector has conducted experiments involving AR in virtual try-on, pioneered by the IKEA company and adopted by its competitors in the sector.

The total EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) expenditure for AR/VR will be $8.4 billion in 2029 according to International Data Corporation, but the current penetration levels in the UK enterprise sector, apart from gaming and a few niche applications, are relatively low.

For the average company in the UK, AR/VR is a potential solution in the realm of the future and not a priority for immediate investment in a custom app development agency’s assistance, important in niche industries such as medical training, high-end retail, and education in the technical fields but unlikely to be a staple of doing business.

Lightweight app models

The concept of the “super app,” which incorporates several services such as payment, travel, messaging, and insurance, has been used in the UK but may find less traction due to the cultural differences, unlike the success recorded in Asian countries where the concept originated.

Voice interfaces and chatbots are handling more complex interactions especially owing to experience of an iOS app development company in the UK that fine-tunes them. Forecasts suggest chatbots will be the main source of customer service and support in the next five years.

Factors influencing custom application development demand

Factors that come from the outside, such as regulation, competition, and resource availability, determine the viability of custom development versus the need for faster and less risky solutions.

Digital transformation growth

The UK government wants Britain to become the most digitally capable G7 nation by 2035.

While the UK has high smartphone adoption and a strong fintech sector, it ranks 25th globally for future digital readiness, suggesting room for improvement particularly among SMEs.

Though each renowned Android app development company in the UK possesses knowledge of partnering with local and global clients, it may bridge this gap, owing to an understanding of the international markets and strong regulatory adherence.

Estimates suggest UK small and medium enterprises could add £94 billion yearly to GDP through better technology adoption.

Compliance and security

The global number of cyberattacks has also increased by 44% from last year. The GDPR mandate has been made compulsory.

Solutions created by a custom mobile app development company make it possible to embed security into the design from the start, but that does not ensure enhanced security. It involves skill and caution irrespective of the development methodology to be employed.

The concept of “preemptive” cybersecurity is taking shape, where applications work to predict and ward off an attack instead of simply reacting to a threat.

Talent gaps

Around 76% of UK companies face problems in recruiting technical staff. The loss is estimated to be worth £4.4 billion a year, and the gap has the potential to escalate to £27.6 billion in the next decade. Software programming and cybersecurity jobs are the most difficult to fill.

Many businesses contact custom app development companies when they want to adopt hybrid models with UK project managers and Eastern European development teams, reducing costs by approximately 45% while introducing coordination challenges.

Sustainability expectations

Technology consumes approximately 10% of global electricity. The EU requires firms to cut digital carbon footprints and it affects UK firms with European clients. This drives interest in efficient algorithms, edge computing reducing data transfer, and cloud providers investing in carbon-neutral infrastructure.

However, sustainability remains secondary in most development decisions compared to cost, functionality, and time to market.

In fact, a Flutter app development company in the UK is able to reach both goals, as such a team enables businesses to cut their expenses, because cross-platform engineering is cheaper than native (if you need your app to be available for both iOS and Android users) and it helps reduce carbon footprint because it uses a single codebase and focuses on performance.

These external factors often prove more decisive than internal preferences, with regulatory requirements, talent availability, and security threats frequently forcing businesses toward or away from custom app engineering regardless of strategic desires.

Conclusion

In the year 2026, custom application development in the UK will be a combination of user expectations and practical development costs, timeliness, and risks. People will look for their own personalised and AI-powered interactions with the system. Besides, applying AI has not become any less costly or easy.

The decision between custom and generic apps is now more complicated than ever. Custom applications provide the owner with all these advantages: control, security, still require a huge investment and constant upkeep. The case studies of the NHS and Monzo are examples of what a good execution can bring about.

If you have a project in mind, but you aren’t sure about what approach to choose, you can contact Limeup. You can evaluate our completed work, receive an estimate to understand a possible budget, and get a strategy that will align with your business goals.

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