Mobile developers in North America are steadily increasing their use of Web technologies and steadily decreasing their use of native platforms when working on mobile apps. In fact, new research from Evans Data strongly suggests that trend lines showing developer adoption rates for the alternative programming models are starting to converge.
The firm recently surveyed North American mobile developers and asked each respondent to state the percent of apps they work on today that are "truly native vs. a shell that launches in a web browser." It also asked developers to project their use of the two approaches for the next year and the next two years.
Evans Data found a significant difference in the use of these two approaches today, with native programming methods highly favored over web-based methods, but the difference between the two will narrow substantially during the next two years. The firm also found that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for native apps is trending downward at a rate of -4.5 percent, while the CAGR for web apps is trending upward at a rate of 3.75 percent.
Developers naturally want to target as many platforms as they can, easily and efficiently, and findings from these types of studies can help them plan their projects and development strategies accordingly.
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Click here to view a larger version of this exclusive chart from Evans Data to FierceDeveloper. |
"Trends within these data indicate that, at some stage in the relatively near future, more developers will gravitate toward cross-platform development using web technologies than those writing natively for devices," Ben Hanley, senior product manager at Evans Data, told FierceDeveloper.