Mobile Apps are hot… Smartphones would probably cease to exist without them.
If you are smartphone owner, think for a second, what would you do with that phone without some of your favorite apps and games on it. And for all those awesome apps, we have to thank the mobile app developers, many of who don’t even make a single dime from it.
Visionmobile, a leading Telecom Analysis and research firm, recently released their mobile developer economic report that gives a glimpse at mobile app developers’ universe. Here are some of the important findings from the report
Contents
Mobile Developer Economics & Growth
Platform Choice
- Although Mobile developers are looking for a viable alternative, majority (80 percent) of them develop apps around Android or iOS or both.
- Android has the largest developer mindshare with over 72% developing apps on Android Platform followed by iOS. HTML is the main technology alternative to the Android-iOS duopoly for mobile developer mindshare
- Although 47 percent of developers intend to adopt Windows phone app development, they are waiting for the right market signals – a critical mass of handsets – before investing in the platform.
- Blackberry developers are in the standby mode and their developer mindshare remained stable at 16 percent. This was largely due to BB10 OS anticipation.
- iOS platform is the winner when it comes to developers’ app development lead mobile platform of choice, with 42% of developers prioritizing iOS, against 31% for Android.
- Most mobile app developers felt that HTML5 needs a better native platform APIs and development environment.
- 86 percent of the developers surveyed target smartphones for app development, with large percentage of them develop on tablets as well. For tablets, 76 percent prefer iOS development (aka for iPads).
Revenues
- Around half of all developers build apps they want to use themselves, but end up generating least revenues.
- Advertising remains the most popular revenue model for app developers.
- In-app purchases and Freemium apps are getting more popular growing 50 percent compared to previous year.
- Google AdMob is clearly the most dominant ad platform with 65 percent developers using their ad services on their apps.
Developer Environment
- App developers today have over 500 third party tools (APIs, SDKs, components) to choose from, catering to every stage along the
Mobile app development life-cycle. - 90% of all mobile developers surveyed use at least one third-party tool or service for their app development.
- Mobile app development frameworks PhoneGap and Appcelerator are most popular and lead developer mindshare.
- For analytics, Google (69 percent) and Flurry(49 percent) remain well ahead of the competition.
- TapJoy (53%) is the most popular cross-promotion network amongst the mobile app developers followed by Flurry AppCircle (20%) and
Chartboost (18%).
If you are a mobile app developer, you must download this detailed 60 page developer economic report released by VisionMobile.
There are many reasons that companies outsource various jobs, but the most prominent advantage seems to be the fact that it often saves money. Many of the companies that provide outsourcing services are able to do the work for considerably less money, as they don’t have to provide benefits to their workers and have fewer overhead expenses to worry about. Depending on location, it may also be more affordable to outsource to companies located in different countries.