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Business

You’ve Built an App: Now What? Part 2: User Retention

user_retention

When devs create apps, it feels like that is the project. But once an app is built and released on an app store, it becomes obvious: creating the app was just the start of the journey. Now comes the really exciting (and scary) stuff: getting that app in front of users who will find it useful, and making sure they keep coming back to your app on a regular basis.

According to the  Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation bi-annual report, mobile is the key platform for application development, with developers also building solutions for desktop browsers, IoT, and now emerging technologies, which includes VR and Machine Learning. But for professional developers, the main game is still mobile, and Android is increasingly dominating as the mobile app platform of choice.

So after you’ve built an app, the first task is to position it so that your potential users start downloading it. User acquisition is all about getting app downloads. After downloads start climbing — even a slow increase is okay as long as it is steady — then it is important to start focusing on retention: getting users to start integrating your app into their habits so they reach for your app regularly.

Caroline Ragot, co-founder of Women in Mobile and a mobile strategist at Schibsted Spain, who has helped shepherd apps at several businesses into top ten rankings, says that without an early focus on retention, any resources invested in user acquisition can be wasted. “When you have a good base, then you can decide to go stronger on acquisition and invest more in downloads, but there is no use doing that too early,” Ragot said. “If you acquire and you cannot retain, then that is money you are throwing out the window.”

Brenden Mulligan, who is currently working on the app platform Firebase, is the former LaunchKit founder, which was recently acquired by Google. He said that the easy answer to retention is to “create an engaging and valuable experience and users will keep coming back over and over.” But, of course, it’s rarely that easy. “Users are constantly distracted with other apps, and everything else going on in their life. Therefore it helps for devs to build in re-engagement triggers into their app. Keep users interested in what’s going on within the app, and remind them to come back if they’ve lapsed too long. Study user behavior to know what the signs of a churning user look like and set up notifications and incentives to come back in before they lose interest.”

App user retention strategies fall into three categories:

  • User experience
  • Re-engagement
  • Performance.

Retention Strategy 1: User Experience

Ægir Thor Steinarsson and Anne-Marthe Lorck recently built the BudUp app aimed at supporting users to make new friends by letting them create and post activities or to join posted activites. Steinarsson said that now that the app has been released, he wants to focus on activities that don’t necessarily scale, but that give him a depth of insight into how downloaders are using the app. “You need to go and talk to people and stop hiding. It is very intimidating. For people who have spent a year and a half building something in the bedroom, it can be really scary.”

Ragot agreed. “You need to speak to people who are using the app, even if you are a dev and social skills are not your forte, you need to go out of the building because that will help you improve your app.” Ragot said that after launching an app, devs should be speaking to every single user. “Do they understand how to use the app? Do they get value out of it? Ask them to use the app in front of you.”

Ragot said the basic funnel for app user retention is the signup process. This is crucial because it is an early step in having the user make a commitment to using the app, and by signing in, it makes it easier to use retention strategies like social media plugins that let the user share in their networks that they are using your app (see part one on acquisition).

Ragot said watching users go through this basic funnel can be revealing. “Even in the beginning, you will see that some don’t know how to hide the keyboard, and maybe that is hiding the button for ‘next’ so if the user is blocked, they don’t complete the signup and they don’t come back. If you paid $1.50 to get that user, that is $1.50 you just lost.”

Retention Strategy 2: Re-Engagement

Echoing Mulligan’s comments about re-engagement triggers, Ragot also suggested using a number of app marketing and user retention products to help automate engagement with users. “The basic strategy is to use a tool for push notifications or in-app messages so you can segment your users,” said Ragot. She suggested using some mobile marketing automation tools to be able to create at least two types of segmentation. The first would be a re-engagement trigger automation so that when users have not used the app within a certain time frame — say, more than one week — they are prompted with a reminder that encourages them to use the app again. For apps like Steinarsson’s BudUp that have a geographical focus for the user, Ragot suggests also using a geographical segmentation to send relevant messages to users within a particular area. She pointed to Appboy, Swrve and Firebase as three tools that can help with this automation and re-engagement.

Ragot also suggested that devs regularly scan reviews of their app and respond to each comment. “Look at every single one and reply to each of them,” Ragot recommended. For now, devs can respond to reviews in Google Play, but apparently Apple has plans to introduce a similar feedback feature soon, too. “You can even say, send an email to support at whatever and we will help you. Try to talk to them, make a list of complaints about what are the major problems. Then you first fix what’s not working, and then you build the cool new features.”

Retention Strategy 3: Performance

Knowing when users are frustrated by their app experience leads to the third important strategy for retaining users: keeping your app highly performant.

48% of users who download an app and see it crash are less likely to use the app again and often quickly delete it for good from their device, with a third (31%) of downloaders then telling others of their negative experience.

“It is very important to have a tool to see the crashes in your app,” said Ragot. She recommended Fabric, which is made by Twitter. “You can integrate their SDK and see live how many people are using your app. It even prioritizes the crashes: it details the number of crashes and identifies at what line of your code it is happening.”

Ragot says that app developers should be aiming for 98% crash free performance.

Acquiring users is a challenging process, so devs need to be sure they can retain those users once they start using your app. Otherwise, there is a risk that the money, time and effort spent on acquisition is wasted as users have a quick look, and never return again.

These retention strategies work equally as well with Android, iOS and Windows mobile apps, but many of the tools available are embedded in the Google Play platform or able to be integrated with Google Play. This is incredibly important, as according to VisionMobile’s Developer Economics State of the Developer Nation bi-annual report, 80% of developers building apps professionally are targeting the Android platform.

In our final part of our series, we look at how developers can set up an analytics process to track acquisition and retention, and we unlock some of the next wave strategies that are not yet flooding the industry and may offer new apps a competitive advantage.

We are currently running our new survey and it is sci-fi themed! Would you like to contribute ? Take the survey 

 

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Business

You’ve Built an App: Now What? Part 1: User Acquisition

user acquisition

user acquisition

Developers are makers. They solve pains, entertain, enlighten, and enhance productivity. Building an app can be an exhilarating experience and the joys of shipping can linger for… about ten seconds. Then comes the question, “I’ve built an app, now what?”

“Building an app is incredibly hard,” said Brenden Mulligan, former LaunchKit founder, which was recently acquired by Google. “But getting people to use it is an even bigger challenge. Once an app is released you start getting so many signals of how it’s doing, and it’s important to have the right infrastructure set up to receive and learn from those signals. Things like user activity, app store reviews, churn… In addition, devs have to be thinking of the next feature, or bugs they need to fix.”

Earlier this year, Ægir Thor Steinarsson and Anne-Marthe Lorck built an app to resolve what they were seeing as a common pain point.

“I am a fairly introverted person, and I am a bit disconnected from social groups: I’m studying with people much younger than me, I live in a foreign country. I mostly felt content in my day to day life, but also that I was missing out: I would end up repeatedly cancelling stuff I did want to do, like go to a concert or even a museum, because I didn’t know who to invite,” said Steinarsson.

“We did interviews with about 40 people and found others were experiencing social isolation as well,  we asked people to give it a pain grade on a scale of 1 to 5 and we started seeing everyone giving it a high pain point (3 and above). That turned out to be the main theme rather than the exception.”

Steinarsson and Lorck created BudUp as an app to solve that: users can register an event (a concert, movie, dinner party or other activity), and specify the number of people they hope to attend with.

The app was released on the Google Play Store. Android is the main mobile platform for professional developers, according to VisionMobile’s State of the Developer Nation quarterly report, which found that Android accounted for 79% of mobile developer mindshare.

For the BudUp team, while they have plans for an iOS app, for now their focus is all about traction: to get user downloads. As they ramp up their user acquisition, Steinarsson wants to make sure he has data systems in place to know what is happening and to monitor the user experience.

Knowing what to measure and using the free tools that can help developers do that quickly is crucial, said Caroline Ragot, Co-founder of Women in Mobile and Mobile Strategist at InfoJobs, a company of Schibsted Spain.

Ragot says there are two tasks to focus on after building an app: the first is acquisition, which is really about marketing an app.

The second task for a new app is to focus on retention. Ragot says retention is about marketing and the product working together. Analytics underpins an understanding of both these tasks.

Focusing on Acquisition: App Store Optimization (ASO)

Increasing user acquisition for your app starts with app store optimization. 30% of downloads occur after someone has searched by keywords in Google Play. So getting noticed within the app marketplace can already drive up user downloads before looking at any other type of promotion.

Ragot says there are three components in app store optimization:

  • text
  • icons
  • Screenshots
  • Review and rating.

Building off the experience of websites in getting noticed, app store optimization makes an impact. Ragot suggests thinking what people will search for when looking for your app, and making sure that those keywords are included in the application title text. “Put the keyword close to your brand,” said Ragot. “When I have done that for app projects, within about two hours I have seen apps move from a ranking of 30-something to a ranking of 8.”

After ASO, the next task is to make sure your icon looks appealing. Don’t believe this is important? Ragot suggests doing a simple app search for something like ‘clock’: “You will see that there will be some you don’t want to download just by looking at them.” In the Google Play console, there is a function to allow developers to A/B test their icons. Ragot suggests testing several and seeing which icon design drives more downloads for your app.

Screenshots are also important. “It’s like the landing page for your app. When visitors arrive, they need to understand what your app is about and it should inspire them to download. It is your first touchpoint with a user,” Ragot explained.

Finally, reviews and ratings make an impact. App stores like Google Play use metrics of downloads and active users as part of their search ranking algorithm, and reviews of apps makes a significant impact on helping encourage searchers to download.

Organic and Paid Acquisition

“The two big acquisition buckets are organic and paid,” said Mulligan, who recently talked about how to optimize app launches with First Round. “Ideally, an app can attract users organically. To do this, there are a lot of ways to optimize a launch to be more successful in initially attracting users. You need to make sure your product name is short and your tagline is clear and concise. You need to figure out what good acquisition looks like for your product and track it from the beginning. You need to bake in marketing hooks that let users share with others how they’re using your app and invite their friends to join them. When the time is right, you need to target the relevant reporters to cover your product and post it to sites with good lead generation like Product Hunt. And the whole time, make sure your line of communication with your early community is very open so you know what’s working, what’s not, and how to change your product to boost your acquisition.”

Other acquisition ideas include Facebook ad campaigns, which Ragot cautions can be expensive, but suggests it is still a good idea to dedicate a small budget of a few thousands dollars to encourage initial traction. Ragot also suggests focusing on social media by encouraging downloaders to share that they have downloaded your app and encourage their networks to do the same.

Steinarsson and Lorck will next focus on content marketing: getting featured in blogs, in particular. They believe when starting to acquire users it is important to do things that don’t necessarily scale in order to maintain an initial personal contact with potential users. They will target several content domains and see in which ones they get traction and focus on those segments to start.

When starting with acquiring users, it can feel like everything is an opportunity cost: choosing one strategy means not investing in another. Setting up analytics to quickly identify what is working is crucial to being able to do more of what works and quickly identify where effort is wasted. Ragot, Mulligan, Steinarsson and Lorck all agree: setting up analytics for acquisition and retention is essential.

And while their strategies are universal across mobile platforms, all three have focused on how to build acquisition with an Android app, reflecting the dominant position of Android in the mobile app developer’s mindshare. According to VisionMobile’s State of the Developer Nation report, 80% of those building apps professionally target Android.

In our next part, we will look at how to retain users once they have started using your app and in part three, we examine what analytics techniques for acquisition and retention to have in place and what free tools to use.

We are currently running our new survey and it is sci-fi themed! Would you like to contribute ? Take the survey 

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Business

A developer’s career path: How to navigate between product & custom software development

developer's career path

The booming IT industry attracts more and more people by offering tremendous job opportunities and compensation well above the average level – according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2015 the median annual salary in IT was twice higher than the national rate. While the IT staff headcount increases dramatically (by 48% in the US and 28% in the UK in 2015, as stated by CompTIA), building a successful career in this dynamic industry requires more than sufficient knowledge of technologies and advanced programming skills. Without a thought-out career strategy that implies progression, one day a developer is likely to find themselves stuck in a dead-end job.

We suggest building a personal career roadmap while leveraging every learning opportunity. An indeed effective way to achieve the goal is to find the balance between experience in product and custom software development companies. Here are the tips on getting maximum valuable knowledge and skills with both types of employers.

A product company to master technical skills

Become a team expert. Stability is what appeals most about starting a career at a large product development company. Developers can work for as a many as 10 years on one product, bringing it to perfection. At this career stage, the underlying opportunity for programmers is to master a particular technology and become an expert in their team or even the entire company. A deep technology experience acquired through time will contribute to a developer’s professional competitiveness in case such a narrow specialist is required by other companies as well.

On the other hand, exactly this narrow specialization is likely to block career growth. Staying for too long in the same position can lead to the stagnation of your skills and pay. In addition, at a big product company the customer-centric approach is mainly adopted at the upper management level, while developers focus more on implementation and efficiency rather than on customers’ business needs. As a result, most developers grow biased towards technicalities without understanding a bigger picture.

Learn to keep it universal. Targeting an entire market segment rather than individual customers makes out-of-the-box software developers think universal in order to come up with products that can be used by a range of companies with similar needs. If you decide to continue your career in custom software development, the vision gained through such an experience will pay off by helping to avoid too narrow thinking while implementing technical solutions.

Grow as fast as the business. A dynamic product company is an ideal environment for a fast career growth if you show the required competencies and are ready to work overtime. As the alternative to a salary, a startup employer can also offer revenue sharing for compensation. This can work fine if the startup makes it, or can leave you broke if it doesn’t.

Stay on the cutting edge. Learning never stops for developers as technologies keep evolving. In the cutting-edge tech environment of product companies, developers can’t help but keep up with innovations in the industry.

The bottom line: Despite their in-depth technological skills, developers who reduce their experience solely to product development can get too far from real-life market needs to get promoted. To overcome this challenge, try getting into the habit of stepping beyond the code and putting yourself in the shoes of marketers or salespeople who actually push your product to the market.

A custom software development company to understand the market

Gain diverse development experience. While being a specialist in a particular technology, a developer is more likely to build a successful career if they have understanding of and hands-on experience with different technologies. Every custom software development company stimulates programmers to learn more technologies and tools, as well as gives opportunities to acquire relevant skills while working on diverse projects.

Understand the customer, market, and industry. In the end, be it a product or a custom solution, software is first and foremost a tool to solve a customer’s challenge. To get promoted to a software architect or a CTO, developers have to learn to see software the way customers do. Get used to asking yourself: How well does the software fit business needs? how cost-effective is it? how well does it integrate with other software? what makes it more usable than competitors’ offering?

At a custom software development company, programmers get the understanding of the customer’s needs first-hand, with no additional research required. As customers often come from different industries, you also get a precious knowledge of their domains, which is hardly possible to acquire in another way.

Master soft skills on the go. The trickery of software development is that it’s indeed a team business that brings together extremely clever but largely introverted minds. When less proficient programmers get promoted quicker than their more technically experienced colleagues, the clue is in the soft skills they manage to nurture at work. The most cited ones are communication skills and responsibility.

Engagement in custom software development allows to develop proficient communication and problem-solving skills, as developers get a chance to communicate with diverse customers across time zones and cultures. A highly qualified developer, such as a software architect, not only understands how technology can solve a customer’s problem but can effectively communicate this vision to the team that will bring the project to life. By learning to effectively interact with all the parties involved in a solution delivery – the team, the product owner, the sales people, etc., a developer gets the communicative competencies required for a managerial position. The ability to undertake responsibility should be also developed and manifested over time. Therefore, it’s important to keep taking on more and more responsibility, first, for the design of smaller elements, then for larger ones, until you get capable of supervising a technical design for the entire solution.

The bottom line: With a wide range of projects, custom software development companies offer opportunities for gaining industry and market understanding, nurturing diverse technical competencies and filling the gaps in soft skills required for a career growth. Yet, with too much orientation on the needs of particular customers, watch out for the problem-solution trap. For this, learn how to recognize similar problems of customers and use best practices acquired while working at previous projects.

Learn to navigate your career path in between

Product and custom software development companies alike provide unique career advantages, so the question is not which one to choose but how to combine experience with both for a bright career. There are at least two strategic options:

The custom software-to-product strategy. A developer starts with 2-3 years at a custom software development company so as to gain understanding of industries and customers, as well as diverse technical experience. Then with the customer-oriented approach deep in mind, they become a more valuable candidate and can move to a position at a higher level at a product company. While being employed with a product development company, the developer continues to master technicalities and complements their vision with a universal approach to software. This makes the developer a reasonable candidate for further promotion.

 The product-to-custom software strategy. First a developer gains a deep technical experience either at a cutting-edge technological startup or, ideally, at a stable product company for about 2 years. Working in the corporate environment first will teach them how to do business at a big scale, which is hardly achievable at a startup. Either way, upon getting a solid technical background and getting used to address similar challenges of diverse customers with a single product, the developer can move to one of the leading custom software development companies. With the previous product development experience, they will quickly climb the career ladder, as long as they keep enriching their understanding of the market through participation in a range of projects.

Afterthought

Combining experience in both areas, a developer becomes a competitive specialist and elevates the chances of employment in (or promotion to) a higher position. For sure, it’s possible to stay self-employed or start your own business right away. Yet, the deal appears too risky with the claimed 80-90% percent rate of startups fails. Besides, in the startup environment, the CEO’s, CMO’s and developer’s responsibilities overlap, which means that to succeed, you will need to demonstrate technical and soft skills alike. With such a solid background, it will be easier to start your own business and survive on the market knowing what product the market needs, as well as how to deliver it. In due course, all these will make you look more reliable in the eyes of investors and raise the chances of staying in the 10-20 % of the startups survived.

 

This post was provided by ScienceSoft, a US-headquartered custom software development company with 450+ IT professionals located internationally. With over 27 years of IT business experience, ScienceSoft is a recognized partner of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and EPiServer.

 

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Business

Whatever happened to Operator Billing?

Operator billing in Mobile Commerce

In 2003 Europe’s mobile operators launched Simpay, promising to let us buy flowers and concert tickets across Europe, with the price added to our mobile phone bill. By 2005 that had morphed into PayForIt, for UK operators only but with similar aspirations, and a similar lack of success. A decade later, mobile network operators are still being cut out of the payment loop, but not for lack of trying.

Operator billing should be the perfect m-commerce platform: Mobile operators store prepaid credit for 77% of their customers, according to the GSMA, and have credit agreements with the other 23%. They have experience dealing with critical systems, and real-time credit checking systems built to take huge loading, so they should be the obvious winners in the m-commerce business. As then-CEO of Vodafone Arun Sarintold the FT in 2007:

“The simple fact that we have the customer and billing relationship is a hugely powerful thing that nobody can take away from us … Whoever comes into the marketplace is going to have to work through us.”

Only they didn’t, and they don’t, and these days operator billing is a minority pastime everywhere – except Africa and the Middle East.

 

Mobile operators in Africa

The data comes from the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey, which reached more than 11,000 mobile developers at the start of 2016. Almost 2,000 of those developers are involved in m-commerce, but only 16% of those have integrated operator billing into their applications.

In Europe, where operators have perhaps tried the hardest to become the wallet of the future, that number drops to 12%, and in North America only 8% of m-commerce developers have bothered to work with the operator to handle billing. In 2010 Verizon launched its own payment service, based on the BilltoMobile platform, but BilltoMobile has been losing money ever since, and in May this year was purchased by UK payment processor Bango.

The argument against operator billing has always been that of interoperability – developers integrating with one mobile operator’s billing system would have to port their code to support another. That was the problem that Simpay, and PayforIt, were designed to solve, and they are far from alone in solving that.

The GSMA’a OneAPI started out as platform for interfacing with SMS Centres and network call management, but quickly focused into a cross-operator billing system to attract operators who proved reluctant to spend money implementing the whole standard. Even GSMA’s decision to host a OneAPI proxy (making it much easier for operators to integrate) wasn’t enough for the operators, and the standard now languishes as a vertical API within a handful of network operators.

In May 2016 yet another attempt was made, with nine of the largest mobile operators joining up to endorse the “Open API” from the TM Forum (an industry body with a decent history of setting architectural standards in infrastructure). This latest set of APIs covers a very wide remit, but includes much that the OneAPI set out to achieve including the resolution of billing events.

Other cross-operator alternatives, such as Telefónica’s BlueVia, have achieved some level of success, but it is probably too late for mobile operators to become the default billing platform they imagined that they would be. Only in the Middle East and Africa is mobile operator billing being used by a significant proportion of m-commerce developers; everywhere else that role is being filled by other players.

Just as Apple and Google provided operator-independent app stores, those companies provide the perfect alternative for developers looking to collect money. Billing through the app store itself, or via the electronic wallets run by Apple and Google, is increasingly popular – and both companies have extended the functionality in recent months.

Credit cards also remain popular. Most credit card processing is done via third-party companies, such as Braintree and Stripe, who compete to provide the best APIs and value-added services. Meanwhile various banking consortia are jumping into the frame, and Visa and MasterCard are funding various competitions intended to raise the profile of their own developer programs, and demonstrate their utility beyond basic transaction processing.

With such strong competition in place the opportunity for operators to step in and take the market is long gone, and developers won’t be easily wooed away from third-party providers. With a coordinated approach the operators certainly could have grabbed the market, but arrogance, lethargy – and the fear of creating an illegal cartel – prevented that future from happening.

The world of mobile commerce is evolving fast, and is only going to become more important as it grows and changes so rapidly, but mobile network operators will struggle to be more than a big player in it.

If you’d like to know more about which m-commerce platforms are gaining ground, or what developers are looking for in an m-commerce platform, then take a look at The evolving state of mobile commerce, a report published by VisionMobile in collaboration with Braintree.

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Business

Getting users to pay for things remains the biggest challenge for app developers

app developers

More than half of app developers are living in “app poverty”: making less than $500 a month from their apps.

We’ve produced an infographic which looks at insights such as this from The Evolving State of Mobile Commerce, a report published by VisionMobile in collaboration with Braintree.

Here are some more of the insights about app developers that are featured in the infographic:

  • Half of M-commerce developers are using the App store
  • Operators are still bankers in the Middle East and Africa
  • Bitcoin is bigger in the Americas

The M-Commerce Ecosystem

This is just a small sample of the insights contained in the report, if you’d like to know more, then take a look at The Evolving State of Mobile Commerce report.

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Business Community

Developer Tools Survey – Winners

prize winners

Welcome to the full rundown of the Developer Economics: Developer Tools Benchmarking (April-May 2016) prize winners. Below you’ll find a table comprised of both the email addresses and countries of all the people that won (the emails are obfuscated for security reasons).

Winners have already been notified by email – if you recognise the email fragment as yours and we haven’t contacted you, please drop us an email at survey@visionmobile.com

Improving ourselves by listening to what you have to say is one of our top priorities so don’t forget to complete the short feedback form we have prepared for you. Our aim is to improve our offering by identifying your interests so we cannot stress enough how important your contribution is!

Complete the form

Survey Prize Winners

Email Prize Country
v*si**m**i*e@pa**l*onp***ures.co.uk Lumia 635 United Kingdom
re***mat@mail.ru Lumia 635 Russia
h*n*okos**@gmail.com Windows IoT dev kits Indonesia
t**as*aj**@gmail.com Windows IoT dev kits Hungary
s***i.t**ral**@gmail.com BQ Aquaris M10 – Ubuntu Edition Tablet The Netherlands
e*@po***hed-pi**ls.com Fossil Watch United States
jar*ds*i*h***@gmail.com Frontend Masters United States
r*ngle**@hotmail.com Balsamiq Desktop United States
ti***a*ti*r@gmail.com Wearables TechCon 2016 – All access pass $645 United States
j**oda*d@ch**ke*dist.com AnDevCon United States
r*d*ar*h@gmail.com GMIC Bangalore 16-17 November Gold pass $200 India
aca*l**@gmail.com iPhone 6S United States
am***o@gmail.com Nexus 6P United Kingdom
a*i*u*@gmail.com Xperia Z5 India
fu**@live.in Choice of Jetbrains IDE up to $300 India
x*c*c*i*96**@gmail.com BlackBerry PRIV Italy
m*i**y**@gmail.com MS Surface 3 tablet United States
ghl****r*@gmail.com Sublime 3 text license Canada
j*n**vid@sch**er.org Intel Galileo Gen 2 Board United States
m*r*st*7*@alice.it Raspberry Pi 3 wi-fi edition Italy
ch***i*s*n*993@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Malaysia
1*3**033*80@163.com Developer T-shirts China
tata**11@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Poland
dra*****ig*t1*21**@yahoo.com Developer T-shirts Vietnam
m*sr*ca*do@gmail.com Developer T-shirts El Salvador
alek***.ma*ar*in@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Russian Federation
a*d**ns**h*****nsyah9@gmail.com Developer T-shirts Indonesia
t*u*gv*@an**ing.com.vn Developer T-shirts Vietnam
e*en**0*@hotmail.com Developer T-shirts Colombia
u****gyu@gmail.com Developer T-shirts United States

Panel Prize Winners

Email Prize
hla***i@hotmail.com GoPro Hero Session camera
al*i**l*ur*c*is@gmail.com GoPro Hero Session camera
d*v@drea**yte.eu WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
mryo82*@gmail.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
ben*a***en@protonmail.ch WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
a**ng5**@126.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
d*ogo***a@gmail.com WD My Passport Ultra 3TB
kma*du*@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
si*e*****el***r*con**ic*.c*m@ru**ell.mat**uli.org Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
tr*nt**ntru**l**t*990@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
h**kon2**@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
huy**ie*25*@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
a**x***er.ra**rd*o@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
em*r*o***@gmail.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
i***.mal@mail.ru Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
31**8**5*@qq.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
hhp*z*@126.com Udemy courses of your choice (up to $80 USD)
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Business

If there were 100 Developers in the world

100 developers in the world

Have you ever asked yourselves what would it be like if there were only 100 developers in the world? Well even if you haven’t, we are sure we have just made you think about it.
Based on our Developer Economics survey that reaches 30,000+ devs per year, across mobile, IoT, cloud, desktop, AR/VR, machine learning , we designed a very interesting Infographic illustrating this scenario.

  • How many men and women would this world include ?
  • Which continent would be the most populated ?
  • How many would be Pros and how many Hobbyists ?
  • How experienced are developers  in this world?
  • What is the most popular coding language?

If there were just 100 developers in the world, then:

100-developers-infographic-visionmobile

Embed

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Business

How many IDEs does it take to create a programmer?

Integrated Development Environments have evolved to solve every problem a developer can have, but in recent years we’ve seen a scaling back of capabilities as developers embrace more-basic options. At VisionMobile our latest developer survey is (amongst other things) trying to find out why, though we do have some ideas on the subject.

Integrated Development Environments

When I first programmed a computer I was lambasted, and very nearly ejected from the school computer club, for not having written my program out on paper before arrival. Computer time was too precious to spend composing lines of code. Minutes at the keyboard should be spent entering pre-written programs; not making them up as one went along.

Needless to say that was a very long time ago. These days program composition is done using a screen (or several) with working code being thrown together in what looks suspiciously like a process of trial-and-error. The modern Integrated Development Environments won’t let a compiler crash for want of a missing semicolon, or the use of the Queen’s English (“colour”? Really? ).

A modern IDE will spot variables using the wrong case, and APIs which haven’t been imported, reducing the development time and making life easier for the developer – but, if modern IDEs are so great, why do so many developers choose not to use them?

Vi, Emacs, Notepad++, and Sublime, all make regular appearances in developer toolkits, despite the existence of fully-featured alternatives. You might be a savant mnemonic who’s only outlets are Street Fighter II and programming in Vi, but for most humans a menu structure and “compile” button are essentials.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio is still the standard by which others are measured, though at $499 it’s not the cheapest option which may put some people off. Eclipse provides almost as much utility for a lot less money (none at all), and Visual Studio Code (Microsoft’s free code editor) is now at version 1, and also free. A licence for Sublime Text, on the other hand, will cost you $70 – so the choice is not really about money.

We know that developers increasingly work across platforms, languages, and sectors, and this may provide an answer. Visual Studio can do it all, creating applications for mobile devices, embedded technology, and cloudy servers, but so can Notepad++, and with less effort, and better support.

Take the support site for the Adafruit Trinket (a $7 prototyping board), which provides a step-by-step guide to creating applications using the Arduino IDE, so when I want to program a Trinket then that’s what I use. I’m sure that I could use Visual Studio, and it would be pretty and probably reduce my development time, but it would take effort to get it configured and I don’t spend enough time programming the Trinket to make it worthwhile.

Similarly – if I’m knocking out some Python I’ll boot up IDLE, and when I need a bit of HTML I’ll use Notepad++. These are not the best tools available, but they are the default tools and will work with every library, plugin, and extension available. If I programmed Python every day then I’d find a better tool (or perhaps a better job), but I’m too lazy to muck about getting a proper IDE configured and will make do with what’s available.

Thanks to a dot.com development career I’ve no time for debuggers or unit testing (testing is what users are for) which makes these bare-bones tools ideal for me, but what we at VisionMobile would like to know is why you choose one IDE over another, and how many you’re using on a daily basis.

Which Integrated Development Environments are you using?

When you complete our 11th Developer Economics survey you won’t just be asked which IDE you like to use, but also what you use it for, and why you like to use it. We’ll break down the data, and share information on who is using what, and why.

We’re not just collecting data on how developers create software. We’re collecting data on how developers would like to create software, and what stands in their way. If you have 12 minutes to spare then do join us in finding out.

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Business

Every year software developers get less experienced

Developer Experience

That might sound odd, but it’s one of many conclusions drawn from our biannual study, and presented on developer experience in our (free) State of the Developer Nation report.

The report draws on data from the world’s-biggest survey of those working in software. During the latest wave we reached more than 21,000 developers, and found that they have less experience than they did a year ago.

Developer Experience across all areas

Not individually of course. There’s no memory loss involved here. What happens is that the developer community is growing, and new programmers inevitably bring down the average level of experience. This has serious implications for the future of the industry.

If we take mobile developers, who are typical, we can see that right now 40% of them have been developing software for more than six years, but a year ago that proportion was 43%. At the other end of the spectrum we have 17% of developers with less than a year under their belt, up from 14% this time last year.

Building Developer Experience

That pattern is repeated across all sectors, even IoT (which is so nascent it often bucks the trends). While a good proportion of developers have built up their skills over time, we are going to have to adjust to a world where more software is being created by developers with less hands-on experience, and understand the implications of that trend.

One of those implication is a shift in the popularity of certain programming languages over their more-traditional brethren. This time we’re focusing in on the last six months, but if we again look at mobile developers we can see them embracing scripting languages, at the cost of Java and the various forms of C. Objective C takes the biggest hit, assaulted by Apple’s new wonderkid Swift on one side, and the (JavaScript powered) cross-platform toolkits on the other. Objective C is dropping fast, while C/C++ has a gentle decline and C# is just about holding its mindshare (thanks to Xamarin, which compiles C# to Android and is now a Microsoft property).

On the cloud the trend is less pronounced, but still evident. Java is growing, but so are all the other languages. PHP… C#… Python… in fact all the top languages have gained mindshare as cloud developers become increasingly polyglot while giving up on some of the niche dialects.

Developer Experience: the rise of high level languages

One area on the rise, across all the sectors, is the use of visual tools for software development. These drag-‘n-drop environments are often looked down upon by “proper” programmers, who respect the digital hierarchy (where Assembler is king, dialects of C make up the court, Java is left outside the room, and scripting languages aren’t permitted into the palace). These visual tools are still only used by a minority (25% of mobile developers, 19% of cloud) and fewer still rely on them as a primary tool (5% across mobile and cloud) but that proportion is growing steadily, and relentlessly.

The fact is that there aren’t enough low-level programmers to go around, and most applications don’t need them. Visual tools, and scripting languages, are good enough for the vast majority of applications in any sector. That applies across consumer and enterprise markets, as users of all kinds start creating apps with a few clicks. However, there is a question about how long can we consider those users to be software developers, and the tools they use to be designed for software development.

“If This Then That” (IFTTT.com) is a marvellous tool, enabling anyone to create “recipes” where an event (“this”) triggers an action (“that”). An incoming email can trigger the (Philips Hue) lights to flash red three times, making the owner feel like Batman while simultaneously aggravating his whole family.

IFTTT users can chain recipes together, creating actions that seed multiple events, loop back on themselves, and even branch based on inputs. At some point we have to accept that the IFTTT user has become a software developer, or that IFTTT shows us what the future of software development might look like.

Not all applications will be written that way of course. Lower-level languages will still be needed to plumb the functionality together, but there will come a time when the vast majority of applications will be created by developers with no software development experience at all.

Developer Experience trends

That day is a long way off, but with every year it gets a little closer and our data shows that process is in action. You can see more by downloading our State of the Developer Nation report, or talking to us about custom reports looking at the developer community, while there still is one.

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Business Community

Cloud & Desktop Developer Landscape

cloud and desktop developers

How is cloud and desktop developers landscape evolving? We’ve prepared an infographic with some key insights that can help you better understand the cloud and desktop development, based on our recent report focusing on the topic. Here are some of the key insights:

  • 49% of developers are working professionally across both cloud and desktop
  • 41% of desktop developers are creating applications which never leave the browser
  • 54% of cloud developers who use advertising are making less than $500/month

Check out the Cloud and Desktop Developers infographic for more insights:

cloud&desktop_infographic

Want more insights?

Find out how you can access the full report.