Month: December 2013

Categories
Business

4 Reasons Not to Build Enterprise Apps

In an earlier post we showed how enterprise app developers make 4 times the revenue of those developing consumer apps on average. Targeting enterprises with apps can be very different from building consumer apps and not all developers prioritise revenue, so it’s not for everyone.

chapter1

Do you want the indie developer lifestyle, or to build a company? What sort of contact do you want to have with your customers? Do you like consulting work or do you prefer to build your own products full time? Do you have a strong development platform preference? Depending on your answers to these questions you might find one of the 4 reasons below keeps you focused on consumer apps for the foreseeable future.

1. You like to work alone

The creation of the app stores enabled vast numbers of individual developers to create and monetise their own apps. Amongst the revenue earning developers targeting consumers, almost 43 percent are in one person companies and practically all of those don’t involve anyone else in development. Of the developers building apps for enterprises, only 13.3 percent are in one person companies and those are almost exclusively doing contract work. The one person enterprise development companies earn 24% more revenue than the equivalents building consumer apps but it’s definitely not the independent developer lifestyle they’re living. In general the enterprise developers earn more than those developing for consumers at every team and company size, with the difference increasing with team size up to the 500 employee mark. Above that revenues from app development per person drop significantly, although on both sides a lot of large companies developing primarily for reasons other than earning revenue are included here.

2. Direct sales repels you

As you can see from the charts above, enterprise app developers tend to work in larger companies than those targeting consumers. There’s also a bigger company size to team size ratio. The difference here is likely to be sales, marketing and support teams. In general, larger customers need more direct contact. In the consumer apps space it’s possible, although unlikely to be successful, to launch an app and sell it without ever having contact with anyone that uses it. However, although the costs of direct sales staff may seem high, consumer apps with large revenues and user bases typically pay to acquire a decent fraction of users (e.g. via in-app ads, Facebook app install ads, cross-promotion networks). We don’t have any data to compare the cost of sales for these developers but I wouldn’t bet that the average cost of sales as a fraction of revenue for the successful consumer app developers was significantly lower.

Whilst subscription revenue is by far the best earner for consumer app developers, it is one of the worst revenue models for enterprise developers. In the enterprise market per user/device licensing and other sales outside of app stores is a key revenue component for most successful businesses. This aspect of a business can often be very unattractive to developers.

3. You want complete creative control

On average [tweetable]enterprise app developers earn a much greater fraction of their revenue from contract work[/tweetable] (consulting). The most successful enterprise app businesses earn 25-75% of their revenue in this way (we only have 25% bands). It’s likely that there’s a lot of custom integration work involved in selling to larger enterprises. Even those selling to SMEs often offer customizations.

Developers who consider their apps an art-form and build them primarily to earn a living doing something creative they love will probably want to stay away from areas where a lot of contract work is involved. Those same developers are also not very likely to be inspired to help automate business processes or other similarly mundane but useful enterprise app functions.

4. You love Android development

There are some very major differences in the revenue models and revenues of enterprise app developers depending on their primary platform. The really big revenues are currently being earned by HTML5 developers (> $100k per developer per month). Next highest revenues are for iOS developers (a little over $50k per developer per month) but it seems that [tweetable]a lot of iOS app enterprise development is currently outsourced[/tweetable], since more than 70% of these earn >75% of their revenue from contract work and 40% earn 100% of their revenue in that way.

Compared to these two, the Android developers are the poor cousins. Despite having a much wider range of revenue models, their average revenue per developer is much lower (about $14k per month). Enterprise development still pays very slightly better on Android than building consumer apps but given the other trade-offs discussed above, it might seem like a relatively poor deal.

Running out of excuses?

When we published the last article, showing that enterprise developers make 4 times as much revenue as those targeting consumers, a lot of responses suggested that this difference was all in the large enterprise sales market and required large direct sales teams. While there is definitely some advantage to scale, this is certainly not the case. Not all enterprises are large and there’s a very big market of SMEs looking for mobile software to make their businesses more efficient or convenient. Although the most profitable enterprise app development companies are in the 51-500 employee range and solo developers are only marginally better off targeting enterprises, a 2-5 person company makes more than 4 times as much revenue on average by choosing to build enterprise apps. The 2-5 person enterprise app business is much more likely to be building HTML5 hybrid wrapper apps rather than the native iOS or Android apps of a similar sized consumer focussed business. They are also likely to be spending more of their time (although far from all of it) doing contract work. If neither of those things bothers you then it might still be worth considering the enterprise market for your next app.

Categories
Business

Why are you still building consumer apps? Enterprise pays 4x more!

Consumer apps are the focus for all the excitement and media attention in the industry. Enterprise software is dull and boring, right? Not if you care about making money! Our data shows [tweetable]enterprise developers generate 4 times as much revenue as those targeting consumers[/tweetable]. Besides, what’s so dreary about reinventing the way people work in a mobile and connected world?

Print

“Wait”, I hear you cry, “what about BYOD and the consumerization of IT? Surely the future is all about selling computing tools directly to professionals?” Well the data from our April-May 2013 Developer Economics survey says that future isn’t here yet. In any case, if you’re going to collaborate with colleagues then you all need to be using the same tools, so most of the time the company still has to choose and buy them.

We asked developers which type of customer they primarily targeted from a selection of Consumers, Professionals, Enterprises, Other and Not Sure. Using this data we can compare the fortunes of developers serving each of those audiences.

It’s entirely natural that a new consumer-focussed computing market for smartphones and tablets spawned a large industry of consumer focussed app development organisations. The market is rapidly maturing now, with smartphone penetration above 50% in all developed markets and tablet adoption not far behind, yet still almost 75% of companies involved in app development are focussed on consumer apps. Traditionally software spending has been much higher in enterprises and although there is a shift towards employees selecting their own technology and tools it is surely not happening as fast as the shift to mobile computing. This leaves a gap in the market for developers focussed on apps for the mobile enterprise to fill.

A little over 12% of the money-making developers in our survey were targeting the enterprise yet they made on average almost 4 times as much revenue (per person involved in development) as those targeting consumers and typically had more than 4 times as many people involved in app development. Developers targeting professional users rather than their companies only made about 50% more revenue per person than consumer focussed developers and had about twice as many people involved in development. So, while this is a promising market, [tweetable]independent app developers are not replacing the enterprise IT department just yet[/tweetable].

At the bottom of the revenue pile it’s no big shock to see that developers who aren’t sure about their target market make by far the least money. How do you build a great product without knowing who it’s for? The small number of respondents who felt their audience didn’t fit one of our categories, selecting “Other”, may possibly be targeting too small a niche since their revenues are not far above half those of developers building consumer apps.

It’s important not to get confused by the similarity of the increased development team size and higher revenue figures – the chart shows revenue per person, so the effect multiplies. That is, the average enterprise focussed app development organisation is making around 16 times as much revenue as the average consumer focussed one in total. That makes the total revenues of the enterprise developers significantly greater than those of the consumer developers, even though there are around 6 times as many of the latter. Averages hide a lot of detail though. You don’t have to build a large company to be extremely profitable in the enterprise mobility market – smaller development teams actually have much higher revenues per developer. More details on that and important differences between consumer and enterprise app developers will be the subject of a future post.

Agree with our figures or disagree? Drop us a comment.

– Mark (@__MarkW__ )

Categories
Tools

A Look at Some of the Top Mobile UI Frameworks

Deciding on a cross-platform tool (CPT) when developing mobile applications is really only the first step of a larger journey. When you choose a web-based CPT (PhoneGap, for example), you’re typically faced with the decision of what UI framework to choose as well.

Blog007-Final

The good news is that there are number of powerful options available. We’ll take a brief look at a few of these in this post. There’s a wide range of what’s available in a UI framework – some focus entirely on widgets (UI components), others provide light app framework functionality and still others provide a more comprehensive set of behaviors covering widgets and application framework concerns. The “right” choice for your project will depend largely on what you need, your team’s background and what kind of control you want to retain over certain aspects of the application architecture.

There are SO many interesting options, it can feel overwhelming even if you’re a veteran of HTML5-based mobile development. Limiting this post to only 4 frameworks was difficult. I will include a list of additional frameworks at the end in case you’d like to explore beyond the few we cover. If you’re looking for a full list of UI frameworks, check out the relevant section on ToolFinder – our online app for helping developers find the right tool!

jQuery Mobile

jquery-mobile

jQuery Mobile is arguably the most widely used mobile framework – benefiting from association with the nearly ubiquitous jQuery project. Due to its recognition and association with jQuery-based open source development, jQuery Mobile boasts a huge number of 3rd party plugins, extensions, tools, themes and more.

High Level Overview

Developers writing mobile and hybrid mobile apps using jQuery Mobile will encounter the following:

  • Heavy use of HTML “data-*” attributes. For example, a “page” in a jQuery Mobile application is simply a DOM element with a “data-role” attribute value like this: <div data-role="page"></div> Experienced web developers will pick up these kinds of framework conventions quickly.
  • jQuery Mobile provides a light application framework – primarily covering navigation, & transitions between views. This can be extended via plugins, or through integration with more comprehensive frameworks. If your “app framework” needs extend beyond transitions and navigations (for example, templating, two-way binding and more), jQuery Mobile alone may not be a good fit.
  • It’s designed to work within a Responsive Web Design (RWD) context – enabling developers to target a wide range of devices.
  • A wide array of device and browser support as well as a helpful theme roller to help with quickly customizing the otherwise “clone” look and feel.

Despite its popularity, jQuery Mobile has been criticized for performing poorly in mobile browsers. The jQuery Mobile team continues to work to improve the framework, including performance issues. If your team opts for jQuery Mobile, avoiding deeply nested DOM structures & unnecessary reflows and investigating the use of libraries like FastClick can help you avoid some of the typical pitfalls that have earned jQuery Mobile the “slow” label.

Widgets

jQuery Mobile’s site currently lists 22 built-in widgets (though the number of custom/3rd party widgets is much higher). Among them are header, footer, navbar, listview, slider popup and more (all the basics you would expect). Creating customized widgets is likely a moderate amount of effort for most developers. jQuery Mobile’s good documentation and examples will be helpful for any team. You can view a list of demos here.

The screen capture below demonstrates one of jQuery Mobile’s widgets: the responsive grid listview:

Licensing

jQuery mobile is free and open source (MIT licensed).

Kendo UI Mobile

Blog007-Final
Telerik’s Kendo UI Mobile framework has emerged as a powerful and performance-minded framework for mobile web and hybrid mobile applications. Kendo UI Mobile provides both UI widgets and app framework functionality. Kendo UI Mobile is part of a larger Kendo UI framework that can target both desktop and mobile devices. In addition, Kendo UI Dataviz is arguably one of the best data visualization libraries available for both desktop and mobile web clients*.

High Level Overview

Developers writing mobile and hybrid mobile apps will encounter the following:

  • Theming that matches the ‘native’ look and feel of iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 8, as well as a “flat” theme that looks nice across multiple devices.
  • Similar to jQuery Mobile, Kendo UI Mobile makes use of HTML5 “data-*” attributes. For example, a “view” in a Kendo UI Mobile application is a DOM element with an attribute/value of ‘data-role=”view”‘. This naturally extends to Kendo UI Mobile’s widgets as well, since (for example) an unordered list element can be made into a “listview” element simply by adding ‘data-role=”listview”‘ to the element.
  • Two-way binding, with a declarative syntax. Kendo UI Mobile provides some fairly sophisticated application framework features, with MVVM (model-view-viewmodel) infrastructure included. Application state is typically maintained in ‘view models’, which are bound to views (DOM templates). As data in views change, the view models are automatically updated (and vice versa). By “declarative” we mean that the metadata necessary to enable two-way binding can be provided in the actual markup. For example, to bind the text content of a span to the “firstName” value of a view model, developers simply include this in the markup: <span data-bind="text: firstName"></span> Frameworks supporting two-way binding often help eliminate the same tired boilerplate code necessary in traversing DOM structures to retrieve state (user input, etc.). This can be a big productivity boost for your team.
  • Also included in the application framework features: view transitions, navigation & layout templates (which can be highly customized) as well as “DataSources” – an abstraction over retrieving data from multiple kinds of sources (for example, simple HTTP services, local data or even some Back-end-as-a-Service offerings). The Kendo UI team has gone quite a ways further than primarily UI/widget focused frameworks like jQuery Mobile in providing more substantial application architectural help.

Widgets

Kendo UI Mobile’s site lists 13 built-in widgets, ranging from ListView, ModalView, and TabStrip to Navbar (including support for header & footer), Drawer and Scroller (and more). Kendo UI Mobile supports creating custom widgets as well.

The screen capture below demonstrates a couple of Kendo UI Mobile’s adaptive widgets: the Grid and Scheduler. You can view additional Kendo UI Mobile demos here.

Licensing

Kendo UI mobile is a paid framework which starts at $199 (includes support for 1 year).

Sencha Touch

Sencha will be a recognizable name to many web & mobile developers – likely due to their response to Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that “HTML5 Wasn’t Ready”. Sencha went on to prove that HTML5 is, indeed, ready for many complex use cases in mobile applications. Sencha Touch – Sencha’s mobile focused HTML5 development platform – goes much further than providing only widget-focused features.

High Level Overview

Sencha recently updated Sencha Touch so that their device APIs fully support Apache Cordova (i.e. – PhoneGap). Similar to Kendo UI Mobile, Sencha Touch makes use of HTML5 and CSS3 (taking advantage of hardware acceleration where possible) to create web-based UIs for mobile apps that aim to rival native UI performance. Developers building projects with Sencha Touch can expect the following:

  • Sencha Touch leans more heavily towards “full app framework” than many other popular options. It provides an MVC style architecture, complete with storage, device profile and top-level application abstractions.
  • Sencha Touch ships with 50 built-in components (and developers can create their own as well).
  • It’s my understanding that Touch shares some common code with ExtJS (and common conceptual paradigms), so developers familiar with ExtJS will pick things up quickly. I would also argue that developers used to frameworks like Backbone.js will also pick up the concepts more readily than developers used to UI frameworks that focus on declarative bindings in markup.
  • Sencha Touch provides its own abstractions for things like history management and XHR – which is in line with expectations of any framework seeking to be a more “one stop/full-stack” option.

Widgets

Components are a key part of Sencha Touch’s architecture. Among the 50 built-in components are ones such as Carousel, Slider, DataView, List, DatePicker and more. In other words – like the frameworks we’ve looked at so far, the essential things you’d expect plus a bit more. The screen capture below is showing some of the animation demos in the “Kitchen Sink” demo application, which highlights many features available in Touch:

Licensing

Sencha Touch has a wide array of licensing options (which can be seen here). It’s free for commercial use (and a GPLv3 option is also available). Sencha offers paid support options for Sencha Touch, starting at $1395 for a 5-developer package.

Chocolate Chip UI

Chocolate Chip UI’s beta debuted on Github roughly 3 years ago. Currently at version 3.0.6, the project has been gaining recognition as a powerful and performance-minded option for both mobile web and hybrid mobile applications targeting iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8. Chocolate Chip UI’s site lists 12 widgets, but simply skimming the documentation will reveal many more. Chocolate Chip UI provides a substantial amount of UI/widget focused features, but also ventures somewhat into “application framework” territory by providing a number of utility methods & view transition features – though it stops short of client-side routing (though there’s nothing preventing you from integrating any number of routing libraries).

High Level Overview

Developers using Chocolate Chip UI will encounter the following:

  • Chocolate Chip UI makes use of semantic HTML5 elements to drive its widgets. Your team may find overtime that this aids markup readability.
  • Chocolate Chip UI encourages the use of their own JavaScript library (ChocolateChip.js) in lieu of jQuery. They maintain that it was created specifically for mobile use and that it is both faster and smaller. It is possible to use jQuery 2.0.3 on Chocolate Chip UI version 3.0.3 and newer. This may prove useful if your team has jQuery plugins which are essential to the project.
  • Chocolate Chip UI provides API hooks to create your own widgets which follow the same paradigm as creating jQuery plugins. This will aid your team’s transition from jQuery to ChocolateChip.js.
  • Chocolate Chip UI uses OS-specific theming, allowing you to target a specific mobile platform (currently iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8) simply by sourcing the appropriate CSS file.
  • Chocolate Chip UI provides layout behaviors to help organize your DOM structure, as well as a number of utility methods including script loading, type testing, string utilities, AJAX communications and more.

Widgets

As mentioned above, Chocolate Chip UI’s home page lists 12 widgets – among them things like Popup, Paging, Range, Switch and multiple types of Lists. However, as you review the documentation, you’ll notice mention of additional widgets such as slide out menus, masks (semi-transparent overlays), split layouts (for tablets) and more. You can see a few of these in the screen capture below (specifically, range/slider and pop-over):

Licensing

Chocolate Chip UI can be licensed either under BSD or commercially. For commercial terms, you need to contact Sourcebits to get a quote. I reached out to Sourcebits to get more information on commercial licensing, and they were very prompt & friendly in replying:

“…our terms for commercial use are an acknowledgment that Sourcebits’ Chocolate Chip UI was used in the creation of the app, something along the lines of “Powered by Chocolate Chip UI”, either in the app’s splash screen or ‘About’ page with tap/link back to ChUI’s awesome landing page, as well as permission to use the brand’s name/logo on our website. In addition we might also wish to collaborate with the brand to create a case study around their use of ChUI. We’d have the same asks if a ChUI web app were being deployed for internal use by an enterprise, too.”

Further Resources

Markus Falk has a fantastic mobile frameworks comparison tool which you may find quite useful in evaluating which options will work for your team. One thing to bear in mind: this comparison chart doesn’t differentiate between UI frameworks and cross-platform tools (like PhoneGap), so it’s useful if you’re looking up supported features for a given framework or comparing two frameworks of the same type (i.e. – apples-to-apples comparison of two or more UI libraries, or CPTs, etc).

Also – check out our own full listing of UI frameworks, on our ToolFinder web app,

This post can’t possibly cover all the UI framework options available – and choosing which ones to write about was extremely difficult, given the amazing number of good choices out there. I’d like to list a few more here to give you the option of further exploring which UI framework(s) may work best for you. Bear in mind that these are web-based UI frameworks for mobile web or hybrid mobile solutions that make use of web-based assets (like PhoneGap):

Have you used any of these options? If so, we’d love to hear about your experience. Feel like one is missing? Let us know! We’d love to hear what you’ve been using.

* I’ve used Raphael and D3.js – and love both (not to mention, both are free frameworks). I think very highly of Kendo UI Dataviz primarily because of the wide browser support (it uses canvas, SVG and VML, depending on the browser) and because of the accessible/intuitive API.

Categories
Tools

HTML5 performance is fine, what we are missing is tools

HTML5 is perceived as a lower quality platform, mainly because of performance. This comes both as a result of survey data, as well as developer interviews. Yet, industry experts claim the problem is lack of tools. So what is the HTML5 really missing, performance or tools?

HTML5-cover

In April 2013 VisionMobile asked mobile app developers what stops them from using HTML5. 46% answered “Performance issues”, followed by 37% who said “Lack of APIs” (sample size: 1,518 developers).

html5_stoppers

We spoke to developers about their views on HTML5 performance. Apostolos Papadopoulos, author of 4sqwifi, a highly acclaimed public WiFi password app, noted “Quality and user experience is top priority for us. Therefore, we prefer going with a Native API”. It’s a common practice for developers to go native for better performance and user experience. But user experience, meaning following the behavioural conventions of the native platform, is a different story and HTML5 can’t help much. Developers can try to imitate but for a truly native UX they have to use Native SDKs; unless we are talking of Firefox OS or the long-awaited Tizen.

Ciprian Borodesku, CEO of Web Crumbz, added “From a business standpoint, there’s a lot of education needed for the acceptance of HTML5. There’s a gap between what we developers can provide and what the clients think we can provide”. The perception of HTML5 being a less capable platform is also common amongst people who commission apps.

Experts point to a tools gap

As part of our How can HTML5 compete with Native? report, VisionMobile conducted 32 interviews with industry experts, from Miško Hevery (author of Angular.js) to Max Firtman (author of “Programming the Mobile Web & jQuery Mobile” published by O’reilly) and Peter-Paul Koch (author of Quirksmode).

It came as a surprise when Robert Shilston, director of FT labs, champion of HTML5 apps, noted that “the biggest issue for HTML5 is the maturity of tools”. He emphasized not performance, but tools, as the key HTML5 gap.

Ran Ben Aharon, head of front-end development of Everything.me, explained it in more colour: “Hearing Mark Zuckerberg denounce HTML5 made me angry at first, but then I looked at some data and realized that the main reason was not performance or APIs but the lack of memory management and debugging tools”.

Even though developers identify performance as the #1 problem of HTML5, a number of experts claim the actual challenge is tools. There’s no contradiction here, performance and tools are related. How can you improve an app, if you can’t measure it? How can you fix a bug, if you can’t replicate it?

HTML5 is like a car without a dashboard

[tweetable]Tools are to HTML5 what a dashboard is to a car[/tweetable]. You can’t run at high speed without knowing how fast the engine runs or you might end up totalling the engine. Likewise, you can’t produce fast HTML5 apps if you don’t have quality debugging and profiling tools.

With HTML5, coding and debugging are two separate processes. There is no self-contained IDE here. Developers code on the editor (e.g. vim or sublime) and debug on the browser, i.e. using Chrome developer tools. But debugging tools are difficult to master and they require a thorough knowledge of the underlying technology, e.g. what is a reflow, how does the garbage collector work, how is a memory leak created.

Louis Stowasser, author of CraftyJS noted “it would be great to have something like YSlow for game developers”. Why pick YSlow and not Chrome developer tools? Well, because the former offers insights on what to fix rather than data requiring interpretation.

Moreover, each browser has its own set of debugging tools. As a result, [tweetable]developers need to become familiar with at least 4 different environments to match the most popular browsers[/tweetable] of the market. And though it’s generally true that these tools look alike, it’s the little bits and pieces that make the difference.

Patrick H. Lauke, former product manager at Opera Software, highlighted the fragmentation of the browser debugging tools by commenting on a W3C public discussion board about our research: “Opera Dragonfly was the first to offer remote debugging and proposed a unified protocol for debugging. Sadly, other browsers showed very little interest and instead went their own separate ways to build something similar but different”. This also touches on the browser politics issue, due to be the subject of another blog post.

Better tools are needed

HTML5, as far as performance is concerned, is adequate for most use cases. And tools like famo.us and Goo Engine provide a testament. The question is no longer *whether* HTML5 can produce quality apps, but *how* easy it is to create quality web apps. What the HTML5 platform desperately needs is easy-to-use debugging and profiling tools.

With the right tools we could see external debugging tools hooking to multiple browsers and even apps able to profile themselves via standard debug APIs.

Web development attracts millions of developers who are new to software engineering because of the learning curve; it’s very easy to get started. The complexity gap between building basic sites and single page web apps (SPAs) is too big of a leap for many to jump over. Improved tool usability is one of the best ways to bridge that gap while also increasing productivity for those already building complex web apps.

What other improvements do you think are needed in HTML5? Download our research and participate in the discussion.

Categories
APIs

Device API Usage and Trends

In the early stages of new technology markets, a lot of services are created because new technology has made new ways of doing things possible. [tweetable]Where app developers go, apps and then users will follow[/tweetable]. By looking at the popularity of various device APIs across platforms, we can see which developers are making the most of the capabilities their devices offer. If we then look at the device APIs that developers say they plan to adopt, we can see future trends in the app market, possibly months before the apps start to appear. Would it be wise to move against the herd, or is the trend really your friend?

Distinctively mobile computing

Mobile computing devices enable a greater range of applications than their desktop counterparts purely by being mobile. There are also features that are unique to, or much more relevant on mobile devices. In our last survey we asked developers about their plans for and usage of device APIs related to these features to gauge how much different groups of developers are taking advantage of mobility. The device APIs we asked about in our survey were those available to HTML5 developers, which allows us to compare their usage versus native developers across the most popular platforms.

Rather unsurprisingly, it turns out that HTML5 developers make less use of almost all device APIs than native developers. A lot of web developers are targeting desktop as well as mobile platforms and as such are less likely to build functionality that relies on mobile device specific APIs. However, that does seem to be changing as HTML5 developers are among the most likely to say they’re planning to use the majority of device APIs. You can see the popularity of each of the APIs covered in our survey by primary platform in the interactive chart below.

Another point to note about almost all of the APIs surveyed is that a greater proportion of iOS and Android developers use them than for other platforms. This suggests some maturity factor for platforms, either through increased competition causing developers to seek out more mobile-specific niches, or more likely, developers becoming more creative with ways to enhance their apps with mobile features over time.

Peering into the future

The differences between what developers are currently using and what they plan to use allows us a glimpse at future trends. Some of them are obvious, like the increase in intent to use the video camera. Video has long been more engaging for users but making effective use of local capturing and uploading relies on high bandwidth mobile uploads, which 4G connections provide. This trend is already preceded by mainstream services like Twitter’s Vine and video features for Instagram and Pinterest. For web developers, WebRTC offers the promise of easily integrated video chat in any site.

Voice recognition is another area where the trend is expected. The technology is maturing and the platform providers are investing heavily. It’s interesting that Windows Phone has the highest fraction of current usage here and the highest planned usage by a fairly wide margin. Perhaps there is some very effective developer marketing for the relevant APIs going on here?

Other APIs on the rise are less obvious, particularly the increase in interest in proximity sensors – the sensor normally used to detect whether you’ve got the phone held to your ear! It’ll be interesting to see what other creative uses developers put this to, or if it has been mistaken for technologies like NFC and Apple’s iBeacons. Sharing and Pairing is another less obvious candidate – as we didn’t specify exact technology here, it’s safe to say interest in various forms of social sharing from apps is unlikely to decline anytime soon and local sharing options such as Apple’s new AirDrop feature are likely to be popular.

User needs trump technical possibility

Given that Apple and Google (Motorola) have added special hardware for motion sensing, it’s not surprising that there’s a resurgence of interest in this type of API. Lets hope this time we get more creative uses like Magic Plan and not just a lot more motion controlled games and fitness trackers. For those looking where to take their app business, it might not be wise to follow any of these trends. Where lots of developers are exploring (and we do all love to explore new technology) there will be a lot of competition, yet the more general transition to mobile computing is still in the early stages. There are probably much more lucrative opportunities in slightly less exciting corners of the market.