P3 Q&A: The 2025 Outlook from P3’s Technical Directors

WordPress is a staple, it’s a large trusted ecosystem that's easy for users and development. The same goes for Shopify when talking eCommerce. I don't see them going anywhere, but I do see other tech springing up that looks very promising, like Webflow. Outside of those, Next.js has a solid foothold and is built on sound tech (Typescript, React, Turbopack) for building Progressive Web Apps and React Native makes building cross platform mobile apps a breeze.

Web Development:

React will continue to be a staple of frontend development. I think the tools and tech around it will continue to fluctuate though. Meta-frameworks as a whole are becoming slightly less popular but I think there's some exciting tech like bun.sh that will continue to push webdev forward.

Game Development:

Godot got a ton of traction last year. Primarily because they had a huge release (Godot 4) towards the end of 2023 and Unity pushed some pretty "anti-developer" practices in their terms of service. I've been using Godot in my personal projects and have been loving it. Godot 4.4 just dropped this March.

Mobile Development:

React Native keeps getting better. For a small shop like ours, it totally makes sense to manage 1 code base for our apps instead of 1 per platform. I feel like 2024 was a slow year for new OS features. A lot of the "new" stuff was a bunch of AI-adjacent bologna.

I think the industry will continue driving towards new tech and AI integrations for better or worse. AI will enable the unfamiliar to produce apps and websites (Devin AI), but they'll be unable to validate the quality/security/functionality of that code.

AI tools will, on the other hand, make development easier as they will streamline simple but time-consuming tasks for devs and content producers alike. It's a double edged sword that will cut both ways if a professional isn't there to validate the output.

We have all seen AI's ability to hallucinate answers or lie outright, giving you garbage and telling you it's exactly what you need. Solid foundations are needed to not produce something that is full of holes or security flaws.

I anxiously await some kind of repercussions from developers or companies being overly trustful and reliant on AI. I think it's pretty easy for people to use it as a crutch so I'm interested to see how that changes things (software quality, developer quality, etc). There's AI tools out there that claim to completely replace software engineers, but I don't personally see that happening reliably within this next year.

While AI is the hot buzzword right now I think excitement will slow down. This past year there have been so many startups and tools out there (a lot of which are just ChatGPT wrappers) it's been hard to really focus with the noise. I think the models and industry just need a bit more time to mature.

The tools can be extremely helpful, in the right hands. They boost my productivity already, and will continue to improve as time goes on. But I believe those that rely on them too much will find their level of knowledge lacking, as they no longer need to know things they think they can simply ask a chatbot.

I don't think developers with the experience it takes to build quality apps from scratch will ever fully trust what AI produces. Skillsets have to grow to include the ability to validate AI output. Testing has always been important, but now it's as crucial as ever.

They are definitely a productivity booster. Despite my caution, it does do a great job dumping out boilerplate outputs for me to use. It just becomes less helpful when problem complexity goes up.

Our internal tools for websites are in the process of being upgraded, so that’s always exciting for me. Progress will lead to faster turnarounds, and a high-quality code base will make for smoother builds. Cloud tech and headless CMS tech has improved recently as well, and I would love to explore that more with our team at P3.

I really look forward to us expanding P3's AppTapp2 platform. Last year was a lot of migrating older apps to it, but this year, I think we have more wiggle room to add some exciting new features to it.