We couldn’t more excited for being a partner of the latest Developer Economics report by our friends & partners at VisionMobile. As always, the Developer Economics report is full of your insights about our mobile app ecosystem. More than 6,000 developers participated and gave their opinions on platforms, revenues, screens, tools & motivation.

Some key findings:

HTML5 has “entrenched itself as a mobile development technology of choice”, with 52 per cent of the developer population using it to create apps.

Most HTML5 developers are targeting the browser, rather than creating standalone apps.

Android is being used by 71 per cent of developers, and iOS, at 57 per cent. Windows Phone has secured 4th position, at 21 per cent.

Modern Mobile developers support 2.9 concurrent platforms on average. Today’s developer is multiplatform.

Developers prefer iOS (59%) over Android (49%) as their primary platform.

iOS continues to be the most revenue-generating platform for developers

Developer Tools is the infrastructure to innovate and differentiate.

Of course our focus is on developer tools and what you have to say about the sector. According to VisionMobile:

In today’s hyper-competitive app economy, developers can’t innovate without a supporting 3rd party tool ecosystem. In this economy, iOS developers have a clear advantage as being most advanced in tool use, and therefore having the infrastructure to innovate and differentiate. The better tools at the developer’s disposal, the more competitive that developer is.

The best testament to the importance of the SDK economy, comes from the fact that the more experienced a developer is, the more likely they are to use third party tools. One could be excused for thinking that developer tools are for rookies, since experienced developers prefer to do things “their way”. Our data shows the exact opposite picture, as shown in the next chart. The more experienced the developer, the higher the usage of developer tools, and in an almost linear way. Experienced developers are much more serious about understanding users, reducing multi-platform costs, monetising from ads and fixing post-launch crashes. An interesting exception is the consistent decline in the use of BaaS, crash reporting and push notifications tools among developers with 10+ years of experience, as these veteran developers often opt for in-house solutions for integration with legacy databases or internal infrastructure.

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