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Smart eyewear promises to transform how we see and interact with the world. Among its many potential advantages, the technology offers hands-free access to information, vision enhancement, and accessibility tools. But until recently, technical limitations—bulky hardware, short battery life, and awkward design—have prevented more widespread adoption of wireless visual assistance solutions.
At the end of 2024 there were 18.8 billion connected IoT devices deployed globally according to IoT Analytics[1]. The number is so large it is difficult to grasp, and yet by the end of the decade IoT Analytics predicts it will have more than doubled to over 40 billion[2], or around five devices for every person on the planet.
This growth is all the more impressive when you consider somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of the currently deployed IoT devices could no longer be in service by 2030, according to industry estimates[3]. While this exponential growth is good news for the IoT, maintaining effective lifecycle support of 40 billion devices—from development to decommissioning—is an enormous undertaking, and one many IoT product developers are unprepared for.
- Read more: Making cellular IoT deployment easie
Overcoming software complexity during development
Building connected devices is getting harder, and what is driving a lot of that complexity is software. The average IoT product development timeline today is 16 months. That hasn’t changed from 10 years ago but the software complexity has. Today almost 30 percent of embedded projects have over 100,000 lines of code, and this increasing complexity is now the number one driver of project delays, and the reason 60 percent of an embedded development project’s cost is software.
Nor is it just a question of software and product development. Interactive connected products need cloud services to make sure they operate as expected, are secure, and can be maintained over their lifespan, and this requires cloud infrastructure. The compliance burden is also increasing as regulators raise the bar on cybersecurity. A good thing of course, but another obstacle that makes it increasingly harder to meet a development deadline.
So how do developers manage the increasing complexity of product development and lifecycle management today? Well we asked them[4]. More than half have started building in-house systems to optimize software development, collect data, and track down issues from their devices when they are in the field. While improved visibility allows them to react faster to issues, it also creates additional problems, not least how to manage the maintenance burden.
Worse, 38 percent of companies are relying on customer complaints and bug reports to identify issues. So until a customer picks up the phone and says: “My device isn't working”, they have no idea there is a problem. Even once alerted it can take weeks to identify the root problem and ship a fix. The end result is engineering teams who should be focused on innovation and getting new products to market instead spending months every year fixing issues. More importantly, it means unhappy customers and the potential for lost business.
- Read more: The Power of Cloud Services
nRF Cloud powered by Memfault
This is why we’ve built nRF Cloud powered by Memfault, bringing Memfault’s proven observability and over-the-air (OTA) infrastructure directly into nRF Cloud, Nordic’s established cloud services platform. The result is a full device observability, device management and location services platform enabling developers to monitor, manage, and update their devices with unprecedented ease and efficiency. With observability, device management, and location services pre-integrated, developers get instant chip-to-Cloud visibility and control – without wasting time and resources building custom Cloud infrastructure.
This gives Nordic customers out-of-the-box access to remote diagnostics, fleet health monitoring, and secure updates across not only its nRF91 Series of cellular IoT SiP modules, but also the nRF54, nRF53 and nRF52 Series’ of multiprotocol wireless SoCs. With simple integration, users can get started at no cost and scale efficiently.
The combination of Memfault’s device observability and nRF Cloud’s device management enables development teams to monitor real-world device behavior, prioritize fixes based on data insights, and deploy updates reliably—even on low-power, intermittently connected devices. This enhanced visibility and control shortens debug cycles, improves product quality in production, and strengthens device security throughout the product lifecycle.
For example, Memfault automatically collects core dumps, logs, and metrics from devices and makes them available for analysis without the end user, or the engineer having to take any manual action. Using this data helps teams accelerate field testing and improve product quality pre-launch by eliminating elusive bugs. Once in production, teams can resolve issues before they cause widespread problems and without organizing expensive returns or site visits. As the fleet grows, prioritizing issues against innovations will be easier, shipping updates to production can happen faster, and customer support can be proactive instead of reactive.
- Read more: Managing IoT Devices from the Cloud
A focus on innovation
Memfault is the only observability solution on the market that is purpose built for low-power, intermittently connected, and compute-constrained devices. As such it pairs perfectly with Nordic’s hardware technologies to provide a solution that will allow Nordic customers to dramatically improve visibility of device performance in the field, without sacrificing battery, connectivity or compute performance.
As importantly, it will allow your engineering team to get back to doing what they do best, developing innovative, reliable products, without the additional burden of designing and maintaining their own in-house cloud infrastructure to monitor and operate devices in production and the field.
References
- State of IoT Summer 2024. IoT Analytics, September 2024
- State of IoT Summer 2024. IoT Analytics, September 2024
- Is Battery Life Hindering the Growth of IoT Devices. Electronics360/GlobalSpec, 2019. Energy Efficient IoT Systems: Designs and Challenges. arXiv 2106.13286, 2021
- The State of IoT Software Development. VDC Research, 2024
