Mobile Developer Survey Sheds Light on the Future of Mobile

Recently Appcelerator and IDC surveyed a group of 6,046 Appcelerator Titanium developers to gather insights about current trends in the mobile world. The survey represents the largest survey of mobile developers in the world, drawing from the Appcelerator community, which includes developers who work across major mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows. Their findings paint an interesting picture for the future of mobile. Here’s a basic summary of the main points:

–        There is increased demand within the enterprise for the development of B2B and B2E mobile apps, and respectively, decreased demand for the development of B2C apps.

–        Most developers view the tablet and the smartphone as equally important form factors to develop for, with the exception of Android developers who generally have bias against the tablet.

–        Developers have increasing interest to work on new and interesting form factors such as Google Glass, “Smart TVs” and connected cars.

–        Despite the explosive market penetration of Android devices, developer interest has not grown for the platform.

And here are some juicy stats from the survey to back up these claims:

–        Q410 to Q213 has seen a 19% decline in developers who report expecting to build consumer-facing apps (B2C) for their enterprise clients. The growth is in business (B2B) and employee (B2E) apps, from 29.3% in Q410 to 42.7% in Q213.

–        63% of developers are reporting “increased” or “greatly increased” enterprise demand for their skills in the past six months.

–        Over the next 6 months, nearly an equivalent percentage of developers expect to build for the tablet as for the smartphone: 81.34% vs. 84%, respectively.

–        61% of developers think that Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) will replace Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) within 24 months for mobile developers.

–        16% of developers expect to build applications for smart TVs within the next six months.

Want more juicy stats? Check out the survey.

How These Trends Affect Scandit

Here at Scandit, we anticipated some time ago that enterprise companies would shift their interest to creating innovative B2B and B2E apps that help them improve their business processes and replace peripheral hardware. That’s why we developed the best mobile barcode scanning software on the market. Our scanner works with Appcelerator Titanium, Phonegap, iOS and Android (with more platforms coming soon), and can scan a barcode from anywhere on a screen and at any angle. It’s truly remarkable, just watch the video:

Developers can get started today by signing up for an Enterprise Trail Account and testing our Barcode Scanner SDK.

Stay tuned for more posts coming up which look at why and how to ruggedize mobile devices!