BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Cloud Services App Developers Go Pro, 28% Are Making More Than $10K A Month

This article is more than 8 years old.

These and many other insights are from the latest Vision Mobile global study of 13,000 developers across 149 nations, Developer Economics: State of the Developer Nation Q3 2015 available here (free, opt-in required). Please see page 42 of the study for an explanation of the methodology.

89% of developers surveyed are working on software projects across multiple areas, often filling their spare time creating apps in their areas of personal interest. Of the developers interested in revenues and building businesses around their apps, Cloud Services is proving to be the most lucrative by a wide margin.

Key take-aways from the report include the following:

  • Cloud Services app development is the most lucrative field to build apps in today, 34% of app developers are making over $5K a month.  In contrast, just 29% of desktop, 28% of mobile app and 21% of IoT developers are generating over $5K in revenues per month.  Just 24% of desktop, 21% mobile apps and 16% for IoT app developers are generating over $10K a month in revenues.

  • Just 16% of developers are using Amazon Web Services as their primary host, with 44% building Cloud Services apps on their own private cloud platforms.  Cloud Services app developers most often create new apps in Java (24%), PHP (21%) and JavaScript (13%) on AWS, further supporting this platforms’ reputation for being language-agnostic. 54% of app developers using the Microsoft Azure platform are choosing C#, which is understandable as Microsoft developed this language and continues to support its global development community.

  • 71% of all mobile developers are targeting Google Android, with 28% only using Android from the top 3 platforms (Android, iOS and Windows Phone). 37% of all mobile developers target both iOS and Android, with iOS taking priority by a significant margin due to the greater revenue potential. The following graphic illustrates the percentage of all mobile developers using each combination of the top 3 platforms.

  • 50% of IoT developers now build software-only solutions. Smart Home (19%), Retail (18%), Industrial IoT (14%) and Wearables (14%) are the most popular vertical markets where software-only IoT apps are being developed.  IoT developers building hardware or firmware-based apps are concentrating on the Smart Home (23%) vertical market.

  • 50% of mobile app developers building a business by targeting Apple iOS are making over $10K a month. 37% of all mobile app developers building e-commerce apps are making over $10K a month, with 19% making over $100K a month.  The study also found that e-commerce apps that concentrate on selling tangible products and services are more lucrative than those relying on advertising revenue. With only 10% of mobile app developers building e-commerce apps and 37% of them generating $10K a month or more in revenue, building apps that sell tangible products and services has strong future revenue potential.

Please click on the “following” button to get every new blog post as soon as its goes live.