Communications of the ACM
Report Reveals Google's Strong Position vs. Facebook in Mobile App Wars
Credit: GregCassar.com
Appcelerator and International Data Corp. (IDC) today (March 20) announced results from a new joint survey of 2,173 Appcelerator developers around the world. Findings reveal developers' accelerating interest in social mobile capabilities, and — notwithstanding Facebook's 900 million users — developers view Google and its broad range of assets (i.e., Google+, search, Gmail, Android, Android Market, etc.) as key to implementing their social strategies in 2012. The Appcelerator/IDC - Q1 Mobile Developer Report also shows that Android — once neck-and-neck with iOS — is seeing waning interest due to continued fragmentation of the platform, and that HTML5 will play a bigger role in the mobile app development space this year.
View a video about the survey and its results.
Key findings of the report include:
- HTML5 becomes important to many mobile development strategies. A resounding 79% of mobile developers report that they will integrate some HTML5 in their apps in 2012. This is much higher than many industry observers had anticipated as late as Q4 2011.
- Developers are struggling to understand and leverage Facebook's social graph. Leveraging the full social graph itself ranked low — tied at 8th out of 11 social priorities for developers, while developers' top uses of social remain notifications, status updates and authentication.
- Google's network effects of its vast assets are a key strategic differentiator against Facebook. Google's footprint across its assets (search, advertising, YouTube, Gmail, Android, Maps, etc.) and its resultant network effects is indexing much higher than expected relative to Facebook, given the size of Facebook's massive lead in social.
- Mobile app development continues to accelerate in 2012. More than half (53.7%) of respondents report that they are now focused on accelerating their mobile strategies compared to 27.4% in 2010, and 16.7% of respondents report that they will be focused on innovating their mobile apps in 2012 compared to 9.2% in 2010.
- Windows Phone 7 interest remains high. WP7 is the clear “number three” OS in terms of priorities, after Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The huge jump in interest in Q4 2011 for that OS is holding steady notwithstanding somewhat disappointing WP7 device sales to date.
- The first quarter saw another sharp drop in developer interest in BlackBerry OS. Developer interest declined from 20.7% in Q4 2011 to 15.5% in Q1 2012, set against negative news around RIM's challenges.
- iOS continues to reign at number one in developer interest levels. Eighty-nine percent (89%) of respondents say they are very interested in developing for the iPhone, followed by the iPad at 88%.
- Android phones and tablets are showing slow erosion of interest levels. This quarter, interest in Android phones dropped 4.7% points to 78.6%, and Android tablets dropped 2.2% points to 65.9% from the previous survey. Although close to or within the margins of error, these drops are consistent with the trend of small but steady erosion in Android interest over the last four quarters, even as enormous growth in Android unit shipments continues.
- Location and notifications are the top two cloud services developers are looking to in order to scale their mobile initiatives. Developer interest in cloud services is strong, with location and notifications the top two services that developers want to integrate into their applications.
About the Survey
Appcelerator and IDC surveyed 2,173 Appcelerator Titanium developers from January 25-27, 2012 on their plans and development priorities, and to further explore those answers, did a follow-up survey of 484 of these respondents between February 21-23. The surveys focused on the developers' plans and perceptions around HTML5, social capabilities, and developers' priorities for 2012 compared to 2011.
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