Last year was quite a bad one for HTML5 in terms of developer mindshare. At the end of 2011, developer sentiment seemed to favour a shift away from native and towards HTML5 for a large range of application categories. As the year went on, there were more horror stories than…

While not all developers are in it for the money, most would like their apps to provide an income and the majority of those struggle to earn revenues that will sustain further development. We defined $500 per app per month as a reasonable global “poverty line”, in some countries this is very low while in […]

One of the most common mistakes developers make when planning the business case for a new app is dramatically overestimating the number of users they will be able to attract, particularly for their first app. The typical argument goes something like this: “My app will be compatible with 400 million devices, if I can reach just 1% of those, that’s 4 million users”. The trap here is…

In our latest developer survey we asked developers about the different screens they target. The results show smartphones are the most popular target, whilst tablets are catching up fast. PCs are most commonly targeted by web developers while TVs are still a niche app market for all developers.

In our latest developer survey we asked developers who use or plan to adopt HTML5 why they do so and also what the technology needs to compete with native alternatives. The results show a tradeoff of increased portability and lower development cost against capability, in the form of reduced API access and a poorer development environment. In this scenario, the key to success with web technologies is taking advantage of their strengths in areas where their weaknesses are less of a handicap.

74% of developers use two or more platforms concurrently. At the same time, developer platform choices are now narrowing. On average mobile developers use 2.6 mobile platforms in our latest research, compared to 2.7 in 2012 and 3.2 in our 2011
research. The Android-iOS duopoly in smartphone sales is gradually creating a concentration of developers around these two platforms: 80% of respondents in our sample develop for Android, iOS or both, making them the baseline in any platform mix. Developers that do not develop for one of these two platforms generate, on average, half the revenue of those developers that do, leaving little doubt as to the concentration of power within these two major ecosystems.

Cross-platform tools (CPTs) address real challenges for developers. Cross-platform tools allow developers to create applications for multiple platforms – usually mobile, but increasingly tablets or TV screens – from almost the same codebase or from within the same design tool. CPTs reduce the cost of platform fragmentation and allow developers to target new platforms at […]

We asked developers to pick the top platform, among all platforms they have used or are planning to use, on a number of different aspects of mobile development such as discovery, learning curve and monetisation. We then compared how iOS and Android fare against each other, based on the opinions of developers using both platforms. Find out which platform came out on top.

Our new Developer Economics survey shows that developer interest in Windows Phone remains high but slightly subdued as a result of poor handset sales. The 55% intentshare from the last survey has not resulted in a single percentage point increase in mindshare (still at 21%). Windows Phone is facing a bootstrapping problem as Microsoft’s huge investment in Windows Phone has yet to pay off. Adoption by developers is not the main issue, as highlighted by the high levels of developer interest in Windows Phone: developers seem to be on standby, waiting for the market signals that justify an investment on the platform.

Ahead of the release of our latest Developer Economics report, we look back at some important results from our last survey. In our 2012 Developer Economics report we included a developer sentiment barometer for the various mobile platforms. As we move into 2013 several new platforms are on their way but all of them look very similar to existing platforms from a developer perspective. We can use this existing data to predict how developers will perceive the new platforms.