A new Appcelerator/IDC report concludes: HTML5 becomes quite important for mobile developers, Google is catching up with Facebook, iOS is doing well, Android slips, WP7 still interesting, BlackBerry is down, and when it comes to cloud services developers are interested in location and notifications.
In January and February 2012, Appcelerator and IDC surveyed a number of 2,173 mobile developers from over 250k Appcelerator Titanium users, attempting to measure developers’ interest in HTML5 and social. Following are the conclusions of the Appcelerator/IDC Mobile Developer Report, Q1 2012 presented in short.
HTML5 is becoming important in mobile with 78% of the developers planning to integrate this web technology in their applications in 2012, both in hybrid (72%) and pure HTML5 applications (6%).
Facebook vs. Google. Developers are struggling understanding and leveraging Facebook’s social graph. Although Facebook has over 425M mobile users and almost 900M regular users, only 61% of the developers consider that Facebook will play a major role in their social strategy, which is not that far from 39% attributed to Google’s role, which has a much smaller Google+ user base. 66% of the developers consider that Google+ will present a strong competitive challenge to Facebook, due to its upcoming integration with a broader range of products, including YouTube, GMail, Maps, Android, etc.
Mobile development is on the rise. More than 50% of the respondents intend to accelerate their mobile development efforts in 2012, compared with 27.4% in 2010.
iOS. Apple’s operating system takes the spotlight with 89% of the developers showing their interest in creating apps for iPhone and 88% for iPad.
Android. Developers’ interest for Android slipped 4.7% over one quarter, being still strong at 78.6%.
Windows Phone 7. The interest in Microsoft’s mobile OS remains high in spite of modest sales.
BlackBerry. Interest in RIM’s OS has dropped from 20.7% in Q4/2011 to 15.5%.
Cloud Services. Developers are interested in using the following cloud services in their mobile applications: Location (35%), Notification (33%), Rating&Reviews (11%), Photo (8%), Check-ins (7%), and Places (6%).
The survey was addressed to developers using Appcelerator Titanium, so the results do not represent all mobile developers, but they can be a good indicator of the current trends in the industry. Titanium is currently 4th on the list of tools developers are using (24%) compared to PhoneGap which is first tool with 32%, according to a report released by VisionMobile.