VisionMobile released their latest report yesterday after surveying over 16,500 developers about their process and expectations. VisionMobile is one of the leading analyst companies concerning application development and community insights. Their most recent State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 report gives a lot of insights about developing for mobile, desktop, cloud, IoT, and augmented/virtual reality platforms. Especially in the case of Windows 10 and mobile focus.
Some of the major insights to the developing community revealed a decrease in the IoT interest as well as a large amount of focus turning towards the new playground of augmented and virtual reality. Both of which Microsoft has a heavy hand in. But that isn’t all that the report spelled out for the major technology company.
The shift of mobile development has begun to weigh heavily for Android compared to previous iOS dominance. Nearly 47% of developers consider Android their primary focus compared to other platforms. About 4/5 of those developers are considered professionals, leaving the minority as hobbyists on Android.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, interest in the Windows Phone cannot compare. Professional developers working with the device as a main platform has fallen down to 4% even as Microsoft seems to turn its attention more to the adoption of Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform. The numbers are staggering all across the globe in favor of Android compared to the lighter amount of Windows prioritization. According to the report:
According to the report:
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.
It’s possible that the development of Windows 10 will begin to shift more primary focus into the mobile platform but it still has a long way to go to catch up. Want to read more of the report in detail? The Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation Q3 2016 can be downloaded for free over on their site.
