The latest trends from our Q4 2017 survey of 21,700+ developers.

SlashData’s Developer Economics is the leading research programme on mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, augmented and virtual reality, and machine learning developers as well as data scientists. It tracks the developer experience across platforms, revenues, apps, languages, tools, APIs, segments, and regions, based on the responses of more than 40,000 developers annually. The 14th Developer Economics global survey wave ran from November to December 2017 and reached more than 21,700 developers in 169 countries. This research report delves into key developer trends for 2018. The report focuses on four major themes – each with its own visualisation: In case you have not heard, the future is AI. Our first chapter looks at six emerging technologies, how each market is developing and which technology developers believe will make the biggest impact in the next five years. AI plays a central role in each of the technologies analysed. Developers are increasingly adopting serverless platforms to reduce cost by paying for only what they use. This chapter looks at adoption trends, satisfaction level and which vendors are leading the way. In our chapter on Augmented and Virtual Reality, we envisage Augmented Reality as an emerging battleground for developer mindshare, with both Apple and Google releasing built-in AR on their smartphone platforms. Dedicated hardware for AR/VR is still of limited interest to developers other than professional games developers, and most are instead targeting the devices that consumers already use: smartphones and desktops. Programming languages are often the kernels of strong communities and the object of opinionated debate. Understanding how widely used a programming language is, can be hard. For the first time, we present estimates for the number of active software developers using a dozen major programming languages, across the globe and across all kinds of programmers.

Methodology

Developer Economics 14th edition reached an impressive 21,700+ respondents from 169 countries around the world. As such, the Developer Economics series continues to be the most global independent research on mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, AR/VR and machine learning developers and data scientists combined ever conducted. The report is based on a large-scale online developer survey designed, produced and carried out by SlashData over a period of eight weeks between November and December 2017.

Respondents to the online survey came from 169 countries, including major app, machine learning 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 eight languages in addition to English (simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, Korean) and promoted by 57 leading community and media partners within the software development industry.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1: In Case You Haven’t Heard It, The Future Is AI
• CHAPTER 2: A Serverless Revolution
• CHAPTER 3: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of AR/VR Developers
• CHAPTER 4: Sizing Program Language Communities
• Methodology