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TM
VisionMobile is the leading analyst company in the app economy and the developer ecosystem. Our surveys and app
analytics track the changing landscape of mobile, IoT, desktop, and cloud developers.
Developer Economics is the most global app developer research & engagement program reaching 16,500+ respondents from
145 countries around the world. Our research program tracks developer experiences across platforms, revenues, apps, tools,
APIs, segments and regions.
Our mantra: We help the world understand developers and developers understand the world.
VisionMobile Ltd.
90 Long Acre, Covent Garden,
London WC2E 9RZ
+44 845 003 8742
Key Insights
1. Mobile platform wars: Round 2
2. Desktop and cloud developer tribes
3. A new phase in the IoT market
4. Where are developers looking next?
Methodology
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Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
Mark Wilcox
Senior Business
Analyst
Stijn Schuermans
Senior Business
Analyst
Christina Voskoglou
Director of Research
and Operations
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
TABLE OF CONTENTS
About Developer Economics ......................................................... 4
Whats next?............................................................................ 19
Methodology............................................................................... 26
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
Thank you
Wed like to thank everyone who helped us reach 16,500+
respondents for our survey, and create this report. Our Research
Partners Intel and Microsoft. Our Leading Community and Media
Partners, who are too many to number here you know who you are!
Also, a special thanks to our partner community Agile Turkey
Software Craftmanship Turkey, who were especially supportive
throughout the survey.
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Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
KEY INSIGHTS
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
Economics survey we can see that the stalemate has been broken and
the second round of the platform wars is now underway.
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
with the iPhone SE. The solution to the second problem is centered
around Swift; Apples new language and, according to
StackOverflow, developers most loved. In East Asia, where Apple
has a big focus on China as potentially its largest market for the
future, we can see that efforts to court developers have been having
some success. The percentage of professional developer prioritising
iOS (17%) is moving ahead of local device market share. In South
Asia, where iOS is weakest in terms of developer preference, Apple
recently announced that they would launch an iOS App Design and
Development Accelerator in Bangalore, India. Its clear that in the
second round of the platform wars, Apple is going to have to work
much harder for developer hearts and minds than when theyd just
redefined the smartphone market the first time around.
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
move completely away from the web to native app only. It turned out
that this trend was driven by correlation and not causation. Very
regular and satisfied customers were willing to download a native app
for a better experience. More occasional customers, and particularly
new customers, would much rather use a mobile website. Flipkarts
native-app-only plan was abandoned towards the end of 2015, and
hopefully the rest of the industry has learned from their mistake. We
expect the mobile browsers comeback to continue for at least the
next few years.
devices, that are both a tablet and a laptop, are successfully blurring
the line between desktop and mobile development. Developers of
desktop apps for Windows are now incentivised to create mobile
optimised UIs too. This has pushed Windows 8/10 into third place
in platform mindshare, with 34% of developers targeting it.
Enterprises using existing, native, Windows apps that are looking to
take advantage of tablets may have significantly less development
effort if they stick with Windows. If they really want to support iOS
or Android then Microsoft can offer them Xamarin, so they dont
have to migrate their code away from .NET.
Windows Phone, which is still selling even if new devices will all be
Windows 10 Mobile, has remained stable at 27% mindshare
although the percentage of professional developers prioritising it has
fallen to 4%. This loyalty from developers may seem surprising in the
face of plummeting market share as Microsoft scales back their
smartphone efforts. Windows on the desktop owes much of its
success to OEMs creating their own hardware in which to run the
Microsoft platform, but despite drops in pricing and other incentives
OEMs have failed to fill the gap. We saw similar temporary loyalty
from BlackBerry developers in the past, as their customers
disappeared too. In this case we wont get to see the true drop in
Windows Phone developers when it comes as theyll be largely
absorbed into the Windows 10 developer pool.
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Node.js, this is only the first choice for 15% of web developers. Web
developers are more likely to prefer JavaScript on the server than
those using any other desktop platform, but not by much. The most
popular language for backend development amongst the web
developers is perhaps the most divisive: PHP is preferred on the
server by 24% of those prioritising the web browser on the desktop.
Yet a simple search will find endless rants going back more than a
decade about how terribly designed PHP is as a language. Most PHP
developers are pragmatists and will claim that its easy to learn, great
for building simple things quickly and trivial to deploy almost
anywhere. Interestingly, theres a larger than average tribe of serverside Java fans (20%) amongst the web developer crowd, whilst the
fairly similar C/C++ is strongly avoided (2%). Perhaps using a very
dynamic and flexible language like JavaScript biases developers away
from having to manage memory manually. At the same time,
Microsoft has also managed to hold onto a decent fraction of
developers that have opted for the advantages of web deployment.
18% of those whose primary desktop platform is the web browser are
using C# on the server.
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Whats next?
What comes after Smart Home? Which other vertical markets are
IoT developers considering?
The biggest loser in terms of developer popularity is Retail, which
experienced a drop of 10 percentage points in one year, from 33% to
23%. Retail is big business, responsible for $22 trillion USD in 2014
or 28% of global GDP, and growing. It was (and is) an obvious
target for early IoT efforts. But the hype around first RFID and then
location beacons seems to be cooling down. Beacons in particular
have not delivered on the promised transformation of the shopping
experience so far, plagued by issues of app discovery and opt-in
Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
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Industrial IoT is not a good entry point. In part, IoT developers are
focusing on fewer verticals. Some multi-vertical IoT developers might
have actively dropped Industrial IoT over the past months, realizing
that it would be difficult to succeed there without focusing on it
exclusively.
Health & Wellness has perhaps the best potential for fast-rising
developer interest. This vertical is surprisingly consumer oriented:
45% of professional IoT developers in this market target consumers,
more than in Smart Home or Wearables. Some developers might be
trying to disrupt the traditional healthcare system with new
technology; others want to ride the Silver Tsunami, the phenomenon
of aging population in many highly-developed nations. While there is
no sustained growth in developer mindshare for this vertical yet, it is
certainly an area to watch closely.
The Connected Car market was abuzz with excitement over car apps
in 2013-2014 (remember Android Auto and Apple CarPlay?), but
enthusiasm has since stalled. In our Q4 2014 survey, 34% of IoT
developers who were not already developing for the car, were
planning to do so in the future. Most of them seem to have given up
on those aspirations, at least for now there is no noticeable rise in
car developers. The rollout of Android Auto and CarPlay is
excruciatingly slow, and the conversation has moved on to
autonomous driving and artificial intelligence; highly specialised areas
that will be out of reach for most developers. Platforms that focus on
vehicle data are not yet mainstream.
Whats to come? Will we see IoT devs soon migrating to more
enterprise oriented markets? Well keep watch! Meanwhile, well dig
much deeper into IoT developer trends in our upcoming IoT
Landscape 2016 report, due in October.
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METHODOLOGY
Developer Economics 11th edition reached an impressive 16,500+
respondents from 145 countries around the world. As such, the
Developer Economics series continues to be the most global
independent research on mobile, desktop, IoT and cloud developers
combined ever conducted. The 11th Edition has expanded our
scope, now also the most global research on augmented and virtual
reality developers, as well as machine learning developers and data
scientists. The report is based on a large-scale online developer
survey designed, produced and carried out by VisionMobile over a
period of six weeks between April and May 2016.
Respondents to the online survey came from over 140 countries,
including major app and IoT development hotspots such as the US,
China, India, Israel, UK and Russia and stretching all the way to
Kenya, Brazil and Jordan. The geographic reach of this survey is truly
reflective of the global scale of the developer economy. The online
survey was translated into 9 languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French,
Turkish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified),
Vietnamese) and promoted by 59 leading community and media
partners within the software development industry.
To eliminate the effect of regional sampling biases, we weighted the
regional distribution across 8 regions by a factor that was determined
by the regional distribution and growth trends identified in our App
Economy research. Each of the separate branches: mobile, desktop,
IoT, cloud, augmented and virtual reality, and data science and
machine learning were weighted independently and then combined.
To minimise other important sampling biases across our outreach
channels, we weighted the responses to derive a representative
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