[With only one week left till the end of our Developer Economics 2013 survey, Andreas Pappas offers a sneak preview into some preliminary results.]
With less than a week to go and over 2,000 developers responding so far, this has been one of our most successful developer surveys to date. It is also our largest project so far, involving the whole team at VisionMobile, 6 sponsors and 26 media and regional partners worldwide. But we don’t want to stop here; we want to push the limits even further and with your help we can achieve this. So, if you’re a developer, take the survey – if not, please help us spread the word far and wide!
Developer Economics reports reach over 35,000 industry members and help developers, platform vendors and other players understand trends and challenges in the app economy and make important decisions about platforms, tools, developer outreach activities and strategy.
If you haven’t taken the survey yet, now is the chance to have your say and shape the things to come. As a bonus, we’ve got some cool gadgets to give away to a few lucky respondents. Also, all respondents are eligible for a free three-month subscription to Bugsense bug-tracking and crash reporting service.
The Developer Economics survey shows some interesting trends so far. We won’t spoil the surprise, so we’re keeping the numbers for later on, after the survey ends and our analysis is completed. What we can reveal though are snippets from a first look into our data:
– Advertising services are the most popular developer tools Ad services (including ad networks and mediation engines, e.g. AdMob) are the most popular tools, used by about a third of developers in our survey. The least popular services so far are Cross-Promotion networks and Voice services, the latter remaining a niche, used by less than 10% of all developers. If you’re a developer using these services we’d be really interested to hear from you. – Android developers are picking up their tablets Our results so far indicate a substantial increase in the number of Android developers that target tablets. This is not surprising following the release of the Nexus tablet, but it could be an indicator that Android is finally making inroads into the tablet market. Nevertheless, iOS remains the king of tablets, with an even larger number of iOS developers developing for iPads. – Advertising is now a more popular revenue model than pay-per downloads Last year the most popular revenue model was pay-per-download, used on average by 34% of developers, followed closely by advertising. The situation has now been reversed, with advertising taking the top spot among revenue models, in terms of popularity but not revenue. – And the best platform is … We asked developer to rate platforms they have already used or are planning to use against a set of attributes such as development cost, learning curve, app discoverability etc. When it comes to the best development environment the jury is split with Android and iOS fighting a very close battle. What’s your take on this? – How do developers decide what app to develop? Do developers sit around and wait for inspiration or do they pay for market research? Well, some of them do both. Others ask their users what apps they would like, while some develop me-too apps. But the majority of developers just develop the apps they want to use themselves!
That’s all we can say for now but stay tuned for the full results. We’re planning to release really interesting data on: – platform mindshare – revenues by platform – revenue models that work best – most popular developer tools by platform & app category – developer tool ratings and selection criteria – and much, much more!
Here’s a list of the tools included in our survey:Ad NetworksAdColony AdMarvel AdMob AdWhirl AirpushApple (iAd) Burstly Fiksu Flurry InMobiInneractive JumpTap Lead Bolt MillenialMedia mOcean MobileMobClix Nexage mopub Smaato warp.lyBack-End as a ServiceACS Applicasa Apstrata Buddy CloudMineCloudyRec Deployd FeedHenry iKnode Kinveykumulos mobDB Parse ScottyApp sencha.ioStackMob Usergrid (Apigee) Trestle (Flurry) QuickBloxBug TrackingAirbreak ApphanceBugSense CrashlyticsCrittercism Hockey AppTestFlight UsermetrixCross-Platform ToolsAdobe AIR Appcelerator AppMobi BrightcoveCorona Marmalade MonoMoSync PhoneGap QtRunRev Sencha UnityCross-Promo NetworksadDash AdDuplex AppCircle (Flurry) Applifier AppFlood (Papaya)Chartboost clashmedia Fiksu G6PayGreatPlay Network Jampp maudau RevMobSponsorPay Tapjoy W3i Wavex (6waves)User AnalyticsApsalar Bango DistimoFlurry Google LocalyticsMobClix mopappTestflight Live (Burstly) UserMetrixVoice ServicesAT&T Deutsche Telecom FonYou GetVocal HarQenHoiio Ifbyphone IOVOX Jaduka MicrosoftOneAPI Sendflow Skype Telefonica TelekuTringMe Tropo Twilio Verizon Vivox
If you haven’t completed the survey yet there’s still some time to do so. We’d really like to hear about your developer experience, either via the survey or directly.
Also, don’t forget to spread the word!
– Andreas You should follow me on Twitter (@pappasandreas)