Developer economics state of the developer nation q3 2016

Developer Economics | State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 | © VisionMobile | All rights reserved | https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go 1
Contents
Key Insights
1. Mobile platform wars: Round 2
2. Desktop and cloud developer tribes
3. A new phase in the IoT market
4. Where are developers looking next?
Methodology
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mark Wilcox
Senior Business
Analyst
Stijn Schuermans
Senior Business
Analyst
Christina Voskoglou
Director of Research
and Operations
Mark has over 13 years of experience in mobile
software across a variety of roles, however. He
received his first computer at 4 years of age and
wrote his first program at 7. He will probably
always be a developer at heart. A growing interest
in economics and business models has led him to
work with VisionMobile as a Business Analyst,
whilst still keeping his development skills up to
date on development projects.
You can reach Mark at:
mark@visionmobile.com
@__MarkW
Stijn has been the lead Internet of Things
researcher in the VisionMobile team since 2012.
He has authored over 20 reports and research
notes on mobile and the Internet of Things. He
focuses on understanding how technology
becomes value-creating innovation, how business
models affect market dynamics, and the
consequences of this for corporate strategy.
Stijn has a Master's degree in engineering and an
MBA. He has over 10 years’ experience as an
engineer, product manager, strategist and business
analyst.
You can reach Stijn at:
stijn@visionmobile.com
@stijnschuermans
Christina leads the analyst team and oversees all
VisionMobile research and data projects (big or
small!), from design to methodology, to analysis
and insights generation. She is also behind
VisionMobile’s outcome-based developer
segmentation model, as well as the Developer
Economics reports and DataBoard subscription
services. While at VisionMobile, Christina has led
data analysis, survey design and methodology for
the ongoing Developer Economics research
program, as well as several other primary research
projects.
You can reach Christina at:
christina@visionmobile.com
@ChristinaVoskog

About Developer Economics ......................................................... 4
Key Insights.................................................................................. 6
Mobile platform wars: Round 2 ..................................................... 7
Android begins to dominate....................................................... 7
iOS is down but far from out...................................................... 8
The mobile browser comeback continues ................................... 8
The Windows 10 plan seems to be working ................................ 9
The final four .......................................................................... 11
Desktop and cloud developer tribes.............................................. 12
Desktop platforms as the basis for developer tribes.................... 12
The diversity of web tribes ....................................................... 12
The shepherding of the Windows tribe ..................................... 13
The Unix tribes are still anti-Microsoft..................................... 14
Why should we care? ............................................................... 16
A new phase in the IoT market .................................................... 17
Smart Home: the undisputed king of IoT verticals .................... 19
What’s next?............................................................................ 19
Where are developers looking next?.............................................. 21
The battle for the next interface ............................................... 21
Making sense of data ............................................................... 22
Skills for the future .................................................................. 23
Methodology............................................................................... 26
TABLE OF CONTENTS

About Developer Economics
Welcome to the State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 report,
based on the 11th Developer Economics global survey wave.
Produced by VisionMobile, Developer Economics is the leading
research program on mobile, desktop, IoT, and cloud developers,
tracking the developer experience across platforms, revenues, apps,
languages, tools, APIs, segments and regions. In this latest survey we
also added two emerging areas of developer activity – augmented and
virtual reality, and machine learning and data science. The 11th
Developer Economics global survey wave ran in April and May 2016
and reached more than 16,500 developers in over 150 countries.
This research report delves into the key developer trends for 2016
and discusses mobile platforms, desktop platforms, server side
languages, IoT markets, and the adoption of emerging technologies.
The report focuses on four major themes – each with its own
visualization, showing how the data lends insight into the developer
community.
1. Mobile platform wars: Round 2 – the mobile developer
population is shifting east and to Android. After years of
stability, Android is now extending its dominance in device
sales to even greater developer mindshare and priority over
iOS.
2. Desktop and cloud developer tribes – there are strong
correlations between desktop developer platform priorities
and their choice of language on the server side. These
illustrate how the developer population is split into
technological tribes.
3. A new phase in the IoT market – the massive influx of
developers to IoT in 2015 has slowed significantly, and
developers are picking which vertical markets to target.
Where are bets going to be placed as the market begins to
mature?
4. Where are developers looking next? Augmented and virtual
reality, and machine learning – are they just the latest over-
hyped technologies or the next big things? The level of
developer interest in both areas suggests the latter.
We hope you’ll enjoy this report and find the insights useful! If you
have any questions or comments, or are looking for additional data,
you can get in touch with Matos Kapetanakis, Senior Manager for
the Developer Economics Program, at hello@visionmobile.com.
You can download this free report at
https://www.DeveloperEconomics.com/go
Mark, Stijn, Bill, Christina, Christos, Matos, Alex, Eitan, Andreas,
Emilia, Dimitris, Kosmas, Vanessa, Sarah, Michael, Nick, Andrea
and Chris at VisionMobile.
Thank you
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us reach 16,500+
respondents for our survey, and create this report. Our Research
Partners – Intel and Microsoft. Our Leading Community and Media
Partners, who are too many to number here – you know who you are!
Also, a special thanks to our partner community Agile Turkey –
Software Craftmanship Turkey, who were especially supportive
throughout the survey.

• Leaping to a new record for any platform since we started
measuring, Android now has 79% mindshare amongst
mobile developers.
• 47% of professional developers now consider Android their
primary platform, up 7 percentage points in the last 6
months.
• The number of professionals who consider iOS their primary
platform fell 8 percentage points from 39% just six months
ago to 31%.
• Microsoft is clearly having some success shepherding
Windows classic developers towards newer technologies; an
impressive 36% primarily use C# on the server.
• Developers that primarily target Linux or macOS on the
desktop are extremely unlikely to use C# on the server. Just
2% of Linux-first developers and 3% of those that prefer
macOS are primarily using C# for their backend.
• The wave of IoT newcomers is coming to an end.
Throughout 2015 roughly half of the IoT developer
population were newbies – 57% in our Q2 2015 survey, and
47% in Q4 2015 had less than an a year of experience, that
proportion dropped to 22% in Q2 2016.
• Smart Home is not just the biggest IoT vertical in terms of
developer interest, with 48% targeting it, but also the fastest
growing – up 6 percentage points in the last year.
• Nearly 23% of developers are already involved in either AR
or VR development, most of those as a hobby or side project.
• An amazing 41% of developers are involved in data science
or machine learning in some way, 33% of those in a
professional capacity.
KEY INSIGHTS

Android’s mindshare has been fluctuating within a very narrow, 70-
73%, range even as the mobile developer population has grown
enormously. Similarly iOS mindshare hasn’t been out of a 51-55%
range since 2013. The mobile browser went out of favour quite
dramatically, but regained mindshare quickly as developers realised
that they now needed a mobile site and an app. Microsoft’s Windows
Phone very slowly gained mindshare and then gave back the gains as
the platform failed to take off with consumers. When it comes to
developer priorities, iOS and Android have been roughly neck and
neck globally, particularly amongst professional developers. There
was a strong bias towards Android in the East and slight bias towards
iOS in the West, with many more developers being based in the
West. It seemed that with the phenomenal number of Android
devices shipping globally developers favouring other platforms would
not be able to justify their preferences forever, yet the status quo
remained. However, with the data from our 11th Developer
Economics survey we can see that the stalemate has been broken and
the second round of the platform wars is now underway.
Android begins to dominate
Leaping to a new record for any platform since we started measuring,
Android now has 79% mindshare amongst mobile developers. While
Android has been ahead of iOS for almost as long as it has existed,
that lead has primarily been driven by greater adoption amongst
hobbyists and those building apps as a sideline. Now we see 80% of
those building apps professionally target Android. This is also
reflected in the priorities of professional developers, with Android up
7 percentage points in the last six months, 47% of developers now
consider it their primary platform. Amongst hobbyists, and those
exploring mobile development on the side, that figure rises to 52%. If
we look across different regions Android still trails iOS by a single
percentage point when it comes to the priority of professional
developers in North America, and the two platforms are level in
Western Europe, but in every other region Android has a clear lead,
and in many developing regions (South Asia, South America, and the
Middle East & Africa) is more than 20 percentage points ahead. The
nature of apps mobile developers build has been shifting away from
1 MOBILE PLATFORM WARS: ROUND 2
Our Developer Economics surveys have tracked mobile platforms since 2010. After an
initial war, in which Android and iOS defeated all competing platforms to form an
effective duopoly, the high-level picture has been stable for more than 2 years.
Leaping to a new record for any platform since we started
measuring, Android now has 79% mindshare amongst mobile
developers.

direct monetisation via paid downloads, advertising, or in-app
purchases, and towards mobile apps as enablers for other businesses.
With Android’s massive advantage in device sales market share,
which all major analysts are now claiming to be above 80%, it’s going
to be increasingly difficult for developers to justify not supporting
Android.
iOS is down but far from out
Android’s success doesn’t mean that iOS is doomed. It seems clear
that Apple have anticipated this scenario and have been taking steps
to manage it. Apple still owns the high-end of the device market and
consequently the most valuable customers. As such they have not lost
significant mindshare yet and probably won’t for some time.
Mindshare for iOS was down to 52% from just over 54% in the last
six months, however that leaves it within the same range it has
occupied for more than 2 years. More importantly iOS mindshare
amongst professional developers remains a very healthy 61% globally.
It is the drop in these professionals prioritising iOS that should be of
much more concern: the number of professionals who consider iOS
their primary platform fell 8 percentage points from 39% just six
months ago to 31% in our most recent survey. Part of Apple’s
dominance of the high-end market has been their status as the
platform for early adopters. iOS has been the platform that has all the
new and cool apps first and usually has the best versions of those
apps. If that advantage shifts to Android then it could start to hit
device sales, which in turn would eventually lead to a downward
spiral in developer interest.
Apple has two key problems: the first is that the high-end of the
market is growing slower than the total market, so their market share
is gradually shrinking; the second is that there’s a shortage of talent
familiar with Apple’s platforms to fill professional roles. There are
less than half as many hobbyists targeting iOS as Android and less
than a third as many who prioritise iOS. To begin to tackle the first
problem Apple took its first real (but small) step further downmarket
with the iPhone SE. The solution to the second problem is centered
around Swift; Apple’s new language and, according to
StackOverflow, developer’s most loved. In East Asia, where Apple
has a big focus on China as potentially its largest market for the
future, we can see that efforts to court developers have been having
some success. The percentage of professional developer prioritising
iOS (17%) is moving ahead of local device market share. In South
Asia, where iOS is weakest in terms of developer preference, Apple
recently announced that they would launch an iOS App Design and
Development Accelerator in Bangalore, India. It’s clear that in the
second round of the platform wars, Apple is going to have to work
much harder for developer hearts and minds than when they’d just
redefined the smartphone market the first time around.
The mobile browser comeback continues
In Q3 of 2014, the mobile browser hit an all-time low of just 15%
mindshare amongst mobile developers, with only 7% of professionals
considering it their primary platform. It has been bouncing back ever
since. Whilst still far away from the dizzy heights of 56% mindshare
that it enjoyed in 2011 the browser as a mobile platform has now
regained a very respectable 30% mindshare, although only 11% of
professionals prioritise it. This is the new place for the browser in the
mobile world. For many it is increasingly essential, if additional,
platform. It’s becoming clear that not everyone wants to download a
native app for everything they do online. A fantastic example of this
is the biggest part of the mobile app economy: e-commerce. Online
retailers were seeing their best customers using native apps, and tried
to push as many as possible to install their app rather than use their
websites. Flipkart are the leading example here, having planned to
The number of professionals who consider iOS their primary
platform fell 8 percentage points from 39% just six months ago
to 31% in our most recent survey.

move completely away from the web to native app only. It turned out
that this trend was driven by correlation and not causation. Very
regular and satisfied customers were willing to download a native app
for a better experience. More occasional customers, and particularly
new customers, would much rather use a mobile website. Flipkart’s
native-app-only plan was abandoned towards the end of 2015, and
hopefully the rest of the industry has learned from their mistake. We
expect the mobile browser’s comeback to continue for at least the
next few years.
The Windows 10 plan seems to be working
Microsoft has been struggling to break into the mobile market ever
since it was slow to react to the iPhone. Despite buying Nokia’s
devices unit and pumping enormous amounts of money into
marketing, sales traction never materialised. Surface tablets with
ARM processors (branded “Surface RT”) didn’t sell either.
Microsoft’s hope of building a profitable niche around their
Continuum concept; smartphones that turn into a full PC when
docked with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, may have been dealt a
blow when Intel decided to pull out of smartphone processors this
year. The docked phone is going to be missing essential enterprise
apps, just as the ARM-based tablets were. However, Windows tablets
with Intel processors are looking like winners, in particular hybrid
devices, that are both a tablet and a laptop, are successfully blurring
the line between desktop and mobile development. Developers of
desktop apps for Windows are now incentivised to create mobile
optimised UI’s too. This has pushed Windows 8/10 into third place
in platform mindshare, with 34% of developers targeting it.
Enterprises using existing, native, Windows apps that are looking to
take advantage of tablets may have significantly less development
effort if they stick with Windows. If they really want to support iOS
or Android then Microsoft can offer them Xamarin, so they don’t
have to migrate their code away from .NET.
Windows Phone, which is still selling even if new devices will all be
Windows 10 Mobile, has remained stable at 27% mindshare
although the percentage of professional developers prioritising it has
fallen to 4%. This loyalty from developers may seem surprising in the
face of plummeting market share as Microsoft scales back their
smartphone efforts. Windows on the desktop owes much of its
success to OEMs creating their own hardware in which to run the
Microsoft platform, but despite drops in pricing and other incentives
OEMs have failed to fill the gap. We saw similar temporary loyalty
from BlackBerry developers in the past, as their customers
disappeared too. In this case we won’t get to see the true drop in
Windows Phone developers when it comes as they’ll be largely
absorbed into the Windows 10 developer pool.

The final four
As Windows Phone eventually disappears, being fully replaced by
Windows 10, we’ll be down to just 4 important platforms in the
mobile market. The many other platforms out there combined have
just 20% mindshare total, and the vast majority of that is Android
variants like Amazon Fire OS, CyanogenMod, and MIUI. These
other platforms, between them, are prioritised by less than 1% of
professional developers. Given the scale of the ecosystems that exist
around the top platforms it’s almost impossible for a new platform to
emerge. Android variants can continue in successful niches as long as
they don’t stray too far from compatibility with Google’s version.
However, without some major shift in UI paradigm transforming the
market, these are the only platforms that matter for the foreseeable
future. We’ll keep watching and reporting on the battle between
Android and iOS at the top, along with Windows and the mobile
browser’s attempts to win greater mindshare. The really interesting
action in the mobile market will be on a different level. The centre of
the mobile development universe is moving east. North America is
heavily populated with hobby and side-project developers and there
are already more professionals in Western Europe, but several other
regions are catching up fast. How will the makeup of the mobile
developer population change in terms of their goals, tools and
revenue models? Will messaging apps successfully build platforms on
top of mobile operating systems? Will augmented and virtual reality,
driven by mobile devices, be the big new computing paradigms? If so,
who will dominate those? Will future success in the mobile platform
and app markets be driven by capability in machine learning? Our
premium research subscriptions will keep you up to date with the
latest data and insights for all of these questions and more.

These developer tribes can then differ significantly in terms of the
tools they use, both technically and for communication, and where
they go to find information. We can see evidence of these tribes if we
look at developers working across both desktop and cloud, and the
correlations between their desktop platform preferences and their
server side language choice. In theory, server side language choice is
independent of desktop platform. Of course there are advantages to
standardising on a particular technology and at least someone in each
organisation has to have a high level of understanding of how
everything works. Even so, the best tool for the job will not always be
the one a development team already knows. This tribal behaviour,
and tendency to stick within a particular technology ecosystem, is the
basis for many developer segmentation models. However, as we’ll
see, these tribal affiliations are neither permanent nor strongly
predictive of future choices when compared with other factors.
Desktop platforms as the basis for developer tribes
Microsoft clearly won the battle for desktop operating systems, and a
big part of that victory was winning over developers. Independent
software vendors built large and successful businesses on top of
Microsoft’s platform and most companies built their internal systems
on it too. Microsoft’s monopoly has multiple opponents. Developers,
originally motivated to preserve the freedom they had in early Unix
days, fought against proprietary operating systems. They eventually
found a viable cause to champion in Linux, although it’s a cause
that’s significantly more popular amongst developers than end users.
Developers who chose and stuck with Apple’s Mac were a very small
tribe with a small but viable niche audience. They’ve experienced a
resurgence in recent history thanks to Apple’s success in mobile
computing. However, by far the biggest opponents of the native
Windows world are web developers. Championing an open
standards-based browser as their runtime, web developers can reach
users on any operating system, avoiding control by any one company.
The diversity of web tribes
Although the web browser forces the use of HTML, CSS and
JavaScript on the front-end, the choice of server side language is then
fairly free. Despite the availability of JavaScript on the backend via
2 DESKTOP AND CLOUD DEVELOPER TRIBES
Developers can be quite a tribal bunch. They often band together around particular
technology clusters, engaging in endless ideological or technical debates with those that
choose other technologies about which is ‘best’. A lot of developers, although far from all,
can end up living within particular technology ecosystems, and learning new technologies
from within those to solve new problems.

Node.js, this is only the first choice for 15% of web developers. Web
developers are more likely to prefer JavaScript on the server than
those using any other desktop platform, but not by much. The most
popular language for backend development amongst the web
developers is perhaps the most divisive: PHP is preferred on the
server by 24% of those prioritising the web browser on the desktop.
Yet a simple search will find endless rants going back more than a
decade about how terribly designed PHP is as a language. Most PHP
developers are pragmatists and will claim that it’s easy to learn, great
for building simple things quickly and trivial to deploy almost
anywhere. Interestingly, there’s a larger than average tribe of server-
side Java fans (20%) amongst the web developer crowd, whilst the
fairly similar C/C++ is strongly avoided (2%). Perhaps using a very
dynamic and flexible language like JavaScript biases developers away
from having to manage memory manually. At the same time,
Microsoft has also managed to hold onto a decent fraction of
developers that have opted for the advantages of web deployment.
18% of those whose primary desktop platform is the web browser are
using C# on the server.
The shepherding of the Windows tribe
Microsoft’s unbeatable advantage on the desktop was built around
the Win32 API. Despite years of modernising and pushing newer
alternatives built around C# and .NET, there are still millions of
applications out there built for the older API in C/C++. This is
currently the largest group of native Windows developers and a
surprisingly large 13% of them still prefer C/C++ on the server too.
However, Microsoft is clearly having some success shepherding them
towards newer technologies, since an impressive 36% primarily use
C# on the server. Amongst the Microsoft-technology-focused
developers that have embraced modern Windows apps on the
desktop, that percentage grows to a massive 41% prioritising C# on
the server (and C/C++ fans fall to 6%). Almost 17% of all Windows
developers prefer PHP on the server, with nearly another 15%
preferring Java. These proportions are consistent across classic and
modern native Windows app developers, with the same being the
case for Ruby, Python, and visual development tools. The key area of
difference between the two outside of C# and C/C++ is that the
more traditional classic Windows app developers are still skeptical of
JavaScript on the server, with only 5% prioritising it, while the
modern Windows developer embraces it at a similar level (12%) to
users of other desktop platforms. While they clearly have a strong
core audience for Azure using C# and .NET, Microsoft also need to
successfully embrace the diversity of server side languages in their
desktop base in order to expand beyond it with their cloud efforts.
Amongst the Microsoft-technology-focused developers that
have embraced modern Windows apps on the desktop, that
percentage grows to a massive 41% prioritising C# on the
server.

The Unix tribes are still anti-Microsoft
It seems that old habits die hard. Under the leadership of Satya
Nadella, Microsoft has transformed their approach to other platforms
and open sourced a significant number of their development
language and tooling code bases. Even so, developers that primarily
target Linux or macOS on the desktop are extremely unlikely to use
C# on the server. Just 2% of Linux-first developers and 3% of those
that prefer macOS are primarily using C# for their backend. The
Linux tribe really like C/C++ on the backend (22% prioritising)
while the macOS tribe do not (just 6% prefer it). Somewhat
surprisingly, those that primarily target macOS are the most likely to
prefer PHP on the server side (26% do so), while the Linux desktop
developers are the least likely to do the same (just 13% prefer PHP).
This is despite the fact that Linux is at the core of the once
ubiquitous LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). Both
tribes are happy with Java, the Linux developers slightly more so
(24% and 18% respectively), and both have about average
preferences for JavaScript. As for the other dynamic languages, both
tribes show an above average fondness for Python, but only those
that prioritise macOS seem to significantly favour Ruby on the
backend.
Just 2% of Linux-first developers and 3% of those that prefer
macOS are primarily using C# for their backend.

Why should we care?
Within tribes, developers adopt more habits than just which
technologies to use. Generalising slightly, the web developer
community tend to open source almost everything on GitHub, ask
and answer questions on StackOverflow, and network with their
peers on Twitter. Microsoft’s developer community has tended not
to open source much in comparison, when they do it has a decent
chance of being on CodePlex instead. They’re active on
StackOverflow, but also use Microsoft’s forums and other smaller
communities extensively. If you try to reach out to them on Twitter
you’ll only see the tip of the iceberg.
For developers this means cross-fertilisation of ideas between
communities is not happening as much as it could. In many ways C#
is a better Java and is evolving faster, yet it’s rejected by many. Going
the other way, there are simply not the open source solutions for
distributed computing that C# developers need to build scalable
cloud services, which the Java ecosystem has in abundance. The
Reactive Extensions that Microsoft pioneered in C# are certainly
spreading across languages and growing in popularity, but there is
resistance to standardising on TypeScript amongst those that want
static type-checking in JavaScript. Meanwhile the Apple tribe now
has Swift, which is well-loved and extremely promising, but it
remains to be seen how it will influence other languages rather than
just become a silo.
The other side of this is that developer marketers have a critical need
to understand their target markets in detail. We’ll be publishing an
in-depth report on where developers go to find information later in
the year. However, while these technology driven splits in the
developer population are important, they are mostly useful as a
secondary tool for understanding future developer choices. When
mobile platforms came along, a lot of the Microsoft developer tribe
decided to explore mobile apps with Windows Phone. Then, when
they wanted to start making some serious money, or make mobile
their new career, they switched platforms to iOS or Android,
depending on their goals. Indeed it is goals that are the causal driver
of developer choices. At VisionMobile this has been at the core of our
segmentation model from the beginning and we have segmentation
reports available for Desktop, Cloud, Mobile and IoT developers
using this approach. Understanding what technology tribes
developers live in can help to fine-tune product positioning and
marketing communications for a specific segment.

This marks a new phase of the IoT market. One sign of this can be
found in the vertical markets that IoT developers focus on.
When developers first join the Internet of Things space many of them
start by playing around with IoT technology without committing to
any specific vertical market (although they might have some in mind
that they plan to enter in the future). Just think about the large
communities that are playfully experimenting with Arduinos or
Raspberry Pis and you understand what this group is about.
Overwhelmingly, these developers self-identify as Hobbyists, who are
in it purely for the fun, or Explorers trying to create career
opportunities – 86% of non-committed developers are found in these
two developer segments. At the start of 2015, 24% of IoT developers
didn’t target any vertical... yet.
As we discussed extensively in our June 2016 IoT Developer
Segmentation report, the percentage of developers without a target
vertical falls quickly with experience; after two or three years in the
field only a small number of developers remain non-committed.
Combined with the end of the large-scale inflow of new IoT
developers, this results in a big drop of non-committed developers:
from 24% to 18% in one year’s time. We’re starting to get a large
pool of fairly experienced IoT developers who know what they’re
after; a more mature, more focused, IoT community.
And what’s the first vertical that many IoT developers pick? Smart
Home.
3 A NEW PHASE IN THE IOT MARKET
2015 saw a massive inflow of developers joining the Internet of Things market. Throughout
that year roughly half of the IoT developer population were newbies; active for less than a
year in the field (57% in our Q2 2015 survey, 47% in Q4 2015). That wave of newcomers is
now coming to an end. The proportion of IoT developers with less than a year of experience
dropped to 22% in Q2 2016; 54% of IoT developers now have one or two years’ experience
in IoT.

Smart Home: the undisputed king of IoT verticals
Almost half (48%) of the IoT developer population now targets the
Smart Home. The next most popular vertical is Wearables, at 29% a
distant second. Smart Home is not just the biggest vertical in terms
of developer interest, but also the fastest growing – up from 42% a
year earlier.
It’s fairly easy to imagine a potentially valuable Smart Home
solution, and technology-wise Smart Home is not the most
challenging vertical to build a prototype for, given the popularity of
Raspberry Pi computers and open source Smart Home platforms.
This makes the vertical very popular among inexperienced IoT
developers. Smart Home has the highest proportion of all verticals of
developers with two years experience or less (78%). It also has the
highest proportion of Hobbyists and Explorers, at 70% combined.
Developers don’t create Smart Home solutions just because it’s easy,
however, they also see this as a time of opportunity – the right time to
enter this market. The Smart Home market is slowly starting to
consolidate. In 2015 and 2016 we’ve seen several high-profile
acquisitions in this space (ADT, iControl), several major failures of
early entrants (Nest ending support for the Revolv hub, layoffs at
Sonos), and Smart Home standards merging (the Open Interconnect
Consortium acquiring UPnP, and subsequently merging with
IoTivity). At the same time we see major platform players coming to
the fore. Amazon leads the pack with Dash buttons and especially
with the developer-friendly Alexa assistant (embodied in the Echo,
Dot, and Tap devices). There is speculation that over 3 million
Echos have been sold, and developers have created over 1,000 Alexa
Skills (services) so far. Google is cleaning house in its Smart Home
efforts, leading to the departure of Nest founder Tony Fadell, and
has recently launched Google Home, a direct competitor to
Amazon’s Echo. Apple inches forward with HomeKit and has
launched a new Home app at WWDC.
Overall, fragmentation seems to be reducing, and it feels like a good
time to execute on a fast-follower strategy, learning from your
predecessors’ mistakes. It’s also becoming clear that artificial
intelligence will be a major component of the Smart Home user
interface, and in that sense the Smart Home market is riding the
hype wave that AI is currently experiencing.
This said, the Smart Home – both as a developer pool and as a
market – is still immature. The killer apps for Smart Home systems
are not yet clear, and the market is still dominated by point solutions
like connected lightbulbs and, more recently, DIY security systems.
There is fierce competition among device makers, which will
undoubtedly lead to heavy commoditization. Security issues and
painful product failures are abound. The Smart Home might be one
of the biggest IoT markets, but these elements are not a reflection of
a highly mature, stable IoT developer ecosystem. One can’t help
wondering whether Smart Home is a good school for starting IoT
developers, and whether or not it will yield skills that can easily be
transferred to other IoT verticals in the future.
What’s next?
What comes after Smart Home? Which other vertical markets are
IoT developers considering?
The biggest loser in terms of developer popularity is Retail, which
experienced a drop of 10 percentage points in one year, from 33% to
23%. Retail is big business, responsible for $22 trillion USD in 2014
or 28% of global GDP, and growing. It was (and is) an obvious
target for early IoT efforts. But the hype around first RFID and then
location beacons seems to be cooling down. Beacons in particular
have not delivered on the promised transformation of the shopping
experience so far, plagued by issues of app discovery and opt-in
Almost half (48%) of the IoT developer population now
targets the Smart Home.

requirements, lack of standardization, practical implementation
difficulties making the solution unreliable, and murky benefits for
users and businesses alike. This said, Retail is still in the top five
most popular verticals, and we can assume that a substantial group of
developers and entrepreneurs will keep chipping away at this sector.
Other verticals are stable over time, with no clear, sustained, trends
in developer popularity, despite the hype around some of them. This
stability is relative, of course; the absolute number of developers
might still be growing together with the overall IoT developer
population. We’ll have more to say on that in our upcoming IoT
Developer Population report.
The Wearables market is still soul-searching, but lacks real forward
momentum. Companies are jostling for position, like Samsung, who
recently stopped producing Android Wear watches in favor of its own
Tizen platform. Android has updated its Wear platform, but mostly it
seems developers are getting more of the same. Apple felt compelled
to thoroughly rethink the user interface for its Watch, after
disappointing user reviews and lackluster developer attention. IoT
developers are interested in Wearables – it remains the second
highest ranking vertical market – but they are also apprehensive.
The Industrial IoT market similarly makes steady progress on the
platform front, without any radical shifts in technology or developer
interest. The drop in relative popularity in the past year is, in part,
explained by the inflow of inexperienced developers, for whom
Industrial IoT is not a good entry point. In part, IoT developers are
focusing on fewer verticals. Some multi-vertical IoT developers might
have actively dropped Industrial IoT over the past months, realizing
that it would be difficult to succeed there without focusing on it
exclusively.
Health & Wellness has perhaps the best potential for fast-rising
developer interest. This vertical is surprisingly consumer oriented:
45% of professional IoT developers in this market target consumers,
more than in Smart Home or Wearables. Some developers might be
trying to disrupt the traditional healthcare system with new
technology; others want to ride the Silver Tsunami, the phenomenon
of aging population in many highly-developed nations. While there is
no sustained growth in developer mindshare for this vertical yet, it is
certainly an area to watch closely.
The Connected Car market was abuzz with excitement over car apps
in 2013-2014 (remember Android Auto and Apple CarPlay?), but
enthusiasm has since stalled. In our Q4 2014 survey, 34% of IoT
developers who were not already developing for the car, were
planning to do so in the future. Most of them seem to have given up
on those aspirations, at least for now – there is no noticeable rise in
car developers. The rollout of Android Auto and CarPlay is
excruciatingly slow, and the conversation has moved on to
autonomous driving and artificial intelligence; highly specialised areas
that will be out of reach for most developers. Platforms that focus on
vehicle data are not yet mainstream.
What’s to come? Will we see IoT devs soon migrating to more
enterprise oriented markets? We’ll keep watch! Meanwhile, we’ll dig
much deeper into IoT developer trends in our upcoming IoT
Landscape 2016 report, due in October.
The biggest loser in terms of developer popularity is Retail,
which experienced a drop of 10 percentage points in one year,
from 33% to 23%.

None of these are new areas of technology but all have become more
prominent thanks to technical developments, sparking new focus and
attention. Is all the media hype reflected in developer activity?
Certainly the two are not proportional. The messaging bot hype has
been at fever pitch in recent months, and yet there’s relatively little
developer activity so far. At the other end, Machine Learning is
probably the least hyped of the three and has the most developer
activity. There are some fantastic opportunities in all of these areas
and we’ll be publishing dedicated reports on each later in the year.
However, for the rest of this chapter we’ll focus on the two that are
currently attracting significant numbers of developers.
The battle for the next interface
Technological change is accelerating. It seems almost impossible to
believe that 10 years ago no-one had a modern touchscreen
smartphone and now 2 billion are in use around the world, most of
them used for hours daily and many essential to lives and businesses.
If we accept the speed with which this change has happened, it
shouldn’t be too hard to believe we may be interacting with digital
content and services via something other than a small black rectangle
10 years from now. In this regard, Virtual Reality may be a side
show. Part of the attraction of the smartphone is that it’s always
available, fitting into the gaps between other activities and usable
almost anywhere. Strapping on a VR headset and stepping into a
virtual world is unlikely to be something most people will do in
public places anytime soon. However, there are potentially industry
changing applications of VR to come in entertainment,
communications, and education. Also, many of the technical
solutions involved in creating a great VR experience may be used in
AR too. The promise of Augmented Reality, or Mixed Reality as
some like to call it, is that instead of digital worlds taking us out of
the physical world, we can integrate the two. The ideal AR glasses, or
maybe even contact lenses, of the future are not only always with us
but able to see what we see. As such they can be used to provide
interactions that are contextually appropriate and relevant. If a screen
is required for some task then there’s no issue of size, with AR any
sized screen can be projected onto the real world.
4 WHERE ARE DEVELOPERS LOOKING NEXT?
As part of the research underpinning Developer Economics we actively monitor industry
trends and opportunities, looking for new areas of significant developer interest. In our
11th Developer Economics survey we investigated the emerging trends for Augmented
Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR), Data Science & Machine Learning, and Messaging
Bots.

Facebook has invested heavily in VR, starting with the acquisition of
Oculus. Most of the games industry is similarly interested in working
in virtual worlds as a much simpler problem than trying to build
games into the real one. Google has focused on commoditizing VR
using the smartphones already in users’ pockets, initially with
Cardboard and now Daydream. They also have some fairly heavy
investments in AR, with the partially paused attempt at Google
Glass, a big stake in Magic Leap, and also Project Tango. Microsoft
is focussing on AR with HoloLens and Apple is keeping silent about
their plans as usual, although their acquisition trail and patent filings
also point to a strong preference for AR. The question is whether the
third party developers that create all the content and services believe
in this future too? With nearly 23% of the developers who took our
survey already involved in either AR or VR development, it seems
that they really do. Most of those developers are very recently
involved and 76% of them only as a hobby or side project. This is the
way we usually see new technology areas explored when the
commercial reality doesn’t yet support many paid jobs. The other
thing our data points to is that these developers think it will be a
consumer-first market. 44% of professionals in this sector are
targeting consumers versus only 19% targeting enterprises. While AR
smartphone apps occasionally take off, like the current Pokemon Go
craze, for these technologies to reach their potential new personal
hardware will be required. This does point quite strongly to the
consumer market as the place to gain initial traction.
Making sense of data
A side effect of there now being a 1990s-level supercomputer in 2-3
billion pockets worldwide is that we’re drowning in data. All of the
data collected in human history, up to the turn of the millennium, is
certainly less than we now generate every day. The Internet of Things
is adding sensors to anything and everything, which will compound
this problem. Some parts of the industry like to talk about Big Data.
The term has been abused close to meaninglessness but at a
minimum we’re talking about too much data to process easily on a
single PC. Definitely too much to load up in a spreadsheet and make
a few charts. The thing is, data doesn’t have to get this big before it’s
too complex for a human to “eyeball” it and spot patterns. This is
where data scientists come in. A data scientist’s role is to extract
useful information from a sea of apparently incomprehensible data.
There are a wide array of statistical tools for doing this in a guided
way but when the dataset is very large, complex, or analysed in real-
time, a popular approach is to have the computer analyse the data
and figure out what’s important. To achieve this the machine needs
to learn about the structure of the data.
The idea of machine learning is an old one. Some of the early
pioneers of computing believed that self-modifying systems that learn
from real world data are the best possibility for producing artificial
intelligence (AI). They didn’t have the hardware or software tools to
build such systems but their intuition was good. The first artificial
neural networks were implemented in the 1950s. However, by the
end of the 1960s it became clear that the computing power available
at the time was insufficient to train more complex networks, capable
of solving non-trivial problems. Focus shifted to a range of other
techniques, many of which have become mature and useful tools.
Not everyone gave up on neural network approaches and eventual
improvements in training algorithms and ongoing increases in
computing power created breakthroughs. A set of techniques for
structuring and training many layered neural networks, collectively
known as Deep Learning, started reaching record levels of
performance in a wide range of problems. Machine learning tools are
The question is whether the third party developers that create
all the content and services believe in this future too? With
nearly 23% of the developers who took our survey already
involved in either AR or VR development, it seems that they
really do.

now at the forefront of AI research again, as well as being
indispensable to data scientists. The trick is that both the data
scientists and the AI systems are using machine learning tools to find
structure and patterns in complex data. The output from the
machine learning systems used by data scientists is being used to
support human decision making at many of the largest organisations
in the world. The output from machine learning subsystems within
an AI system is used to drive autonomous behaviour.
The really headline-grabbing breakthroughs in AI have come in the
last year, so it’s perhaps not surprising that machine learning has a lot
of developers newly interested and exploring via a side project. Data
science and machine learning in general have been helping
companies do more with their data for several years now, so the fact
that 41% of the developers in our latest survey are involved in some
way makes sense too. 33% of them are professionally involved, and
they show more of a bias towards enterprise and internal audiences.
If we look at the hobby and side project activity it’s clear that a lot of
developers are just learning the ropes. 41% are not sure what
audience they’re targeting, typically suggesting a pure technology
exploration. Across the whole sector open source toolkits in Python
and R are extremely popular, whilst there are smaller but clear early
signs of interest in internet-giant-backed offerings like Google’s
TensorFlow.
Skills for the future
Although there are already important and highly profitable
applications for these emerging technologies, it’s clear that they have
much bigger roles to play in the future. The global developer
population is busy levelling up their skills to co-create that future, or
at least be ready to benefit when it arrives. The huge interest in AR,
VR, and Machine Learning, when compared to the relatively tiny
activity levels in messaging bots, is perhaps in recognition of their
significance. Indeed, unless we integrate computing directly with our
thoughts, AR might be the final interface paradigm. Similarly
Machine Learning is likely to be a central part of most of the really
important systems created in the future. It’ll be the magic behind
many amazing new products and the automating force that comes to
replace many white collar workers. Hopefully technology will be
giving with one hand while taking with the other, creating jobs in our
virtual and augmented worlds to replace the ones it’s eliminating
from the physical one. If not, being a developer with skills in either or
both of these areas may be one of the safest places to be.
Data science and machine learning in general have been
helping companies do more with their data for several years
now, so the fact that 41% of the developers in our latest survey
are involved in some way makes sense.

Developer Economics 11th edition reached an impressive 16,500+
respondents from 145 countries around the world. As such, the
Developer Economics series continues to be the most global
independent research on mobile, desktop, IoT and cloud developers
combined ever conducted. The 11th Edition has expanded our
scope, now also the most global research on augmented and virtual
reality developers, as well as machine learning developers and data
scientists. The report is based on a large-scale online developer
survey designed, produced and carried out by VisionMobile over a
period of six weeks between April and May 2016.
Respondents to the online survey came from over 140 countries,
including major app and IoT development hotspots such as the US,
China, India, Israel, UK and Russia and stretching all the way to
Kenya, Brazil and Jordan. The geographic reach of this survey is truly
reflective of the global scale of the developer economy. The online
survey was translated into 9 languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French,
Turkish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified),
Vietnamese) and promoted by 59 leading community and media
partners within the software development industry.
To eliminate the effect of regional sampling biases, we weighted the
regional distribution across 8 regions by a factor that was determined
by the regional distribution and growth trends identified in our App
Economy research. Each of the separate branches: mobile, desktop,
IoT, cloud, augmented and virtual reality, and data science and
machine learning were weighted independently and then combined.
To minimise other important sampling biases across our outreach
channels, we weighted the responses to derive a representative
distribution for platforms, segments and types of IoT project. Where
we had sufficient historical data we used a Random Forest to
calculate appropriate weights. In new branches and areas where
response options had changed significantly we compared the
distribution across a number of different developer outreach channels
and identified statistically significant channels that exhibited the
lowest variability from the platform medians across our whole sample
base. From these channels we excluded the channels of our research
partners to eliminate sampling bias due to respondents recruited via
these channels. We derived a weighted platform distribution based
on platform data from independent, representative channels. Again,
this was performed separately for each of mobile, IoT, desktop and
cloud, augmented and virtual reality, and data science and machine
learning.
In addition we have historically only allowed each developer to
answer questions related to a single area of development, selected
randomly from the ones they indicate involvement with. In this 11th
edition survey we have allowed developers to select which
development areas they answer questions about and to answer
questions about multiple areas. This captures significantly more data
and allows us to look at the choices of a single developer across areas.
However, it also creates a selection bias that favours professional
developers in each area, as developers tend to select areas in which
they are involved professionally. We applied a correction for this on
top of the other weighting of responses to make the distribution of
professionals and hobby/side project developers representative of the
overall involvement in each development area.
METHODOLOGY

distilling market noise into market sense

Developer economics state of the developer nation q3 2016

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Developer economics state of the developer nation q3 2016