JavaScript is not the world’s most elegant programming language. So much so that one of the world’s top experts on the language wrote a book about “The Good Parts”. Even so, JavaScript has rapidly become one of the most popular languages in the world and it is steadily gaining ground on mobile. Will it eventually dominate there too?

Microsoft was slow to react to the step change in user experience provided by iOS and Android versus the first generation smartphone platforms. In terms of their share of the mobile OS market, Microsoft is a long way behind Apple and Google. However, as enterprises are increasingly making big investments in mobile, Microsoft still has a significant opportunity.

Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The latest Developer Economics survey showed that 38% of mobile developers were using C# for some of their work and 16% use it as their main language. Those developers are not all focused on Microsoft platforms by a long way. So what are they doing?

According to our latest developer research, 20% of mobile app developers primarily target enterprises. This decision produces a significant boost to their revenues, with 43% making more than $10K per month versus 19% of those who target consumers above the same revenue level. Similarly at the $100K+ per month revenue level we have 18% of developers who target enterprises versus just 7% of those who target consumers. Aside from selling to businesses, government or non-profit organisations rather than consumers, what are these developers doing differently?

Our 8th Developer Economics survey has once again achieved an industry leading scale,
including responses from more than 8,000 app developers and 143 countries. Their collective insight shows us an app economy that’s beginning to mature. Platform mindshare and priorities are fairly stable and developers are increasingly turning to cross-platform technologies to deal with the multi-platform reality. Tool adoption is gradually increasing and a shift in focus towards enterprise app development is underway.

How do you design the UI for a new app or feature? Good old fashioned pencil and paper? Photoshop or Sketch? Perhaps a wireframing tool like Balsamiq? Maybe you build clickable mockups or fully interactive prototypes? However you go about it, getting some feedback on a design before it’s fully coded is great way to save time and effort. When building apps for clients they’re usually a lot happier if they can see and touch what they’ll be getting before it’s built.

In our latest report, App Economy Forecasts 2015 – 2017, we estimate the number of mobile developers in 2014 at 5.5 million. Demand for mobile development skills has never been higher and yet revenue from app store sales cannot possibly pay their salaries.

A major theme in our State of the Developer Nation reports is an increasingly gloomy picture of typical developer revenues. The vast majority of developers make very little money from their apps. However, there are a lot of developers out there and a decent fraction of them make a good living, some are building thriving businesses on the app stores and a few at the top are even creating multi-billion dollar companies. So, what’s different about the developers that are succeeding financially versus those that are living in app poverty?

North America plays a very central part in the app economy. Not only is it home to the companies that create all of the leading mobile platforms, it is also the largest creator of app revenues.

Although building a separate native app per platform is currently proving to be the most successful approach for mass market consumer apps, there are still a lot of situations where it makes more sense to go cross-platform.