VisionMobile has published the Developer Economics: State of the Developer Nation Q3 2015 survey, observing that most developers are male and young, Windows leads on the desktop followed by the browser, developers like to keep their code in private clouds and they make most of the money from cloud services.
One of the first findings of the survey is that the vast majority of the developers are males, the number of females varying between 3% in South America and 10% in North America. Also, the average age of the developer is around 30 years:
| Region | Male (%) | Average Age (y) |
| North America | 90 | 34 |
| South America | 97 | 30 |
| Europe | 96 | 32 |
| Africa | 91 | 27 |
| Asia | 95 | 27 |
| Oceania | 93 | 34 |
| Worldwide | ~94 | ~30 |
On the mobile front, the study noticed that iOS still leads in the high-end segment and iOS developers still make more money per transaction but “the quantity of users buying through their Android devices will more than compensate for this over the next few years.” As a result, Android is the most popular mobile platform (71%) with iOS coming second (51%) and Windows third (27%). Many developers are developing for multiple platforms, 37% targeting both Android and iOS while 11% are targeting all three major operating systems.
44% of the developers expressed their intent to move off Windows Phone to Windows 10, but the authors of the study expect less developers to target Microsoft’s mobile platform because of the small market share and a decline in developer interest manifested over the last 6 months, dropping from 30% to 27%.
When it comes to the desktop, Windows is the main operating system with 41% of developers having it as the primary platform they write for. Next comes the browser with a share of 37% of developers, followed by Linux with 11% and Mac OS X with 6%. The authors find it interesting that 2% of developers write for Chrome OS which has a “negligible market share,” considering that
Developer interest in Google’s thin client is in part driven by curiosity, as a new technology developers are keen to understand its capabilities and limitations, and Google has worked hard to make it easy for developers to package applications for its platform. Taking a web app and bundling it for Chrome OS is trivial, but the fact that developers are doing it still demonstrates a growing interest in the use of thin clients.
For security and resilience reasons, the majority of cloud developers (over 50%) prefer private clouds not public ones, according to the study. The others are divided as following: AWS (16%), Azure (13%), Google (8%), Digital Ocean (4%), and Heroku (2%). The predominant languages used in the cloud are: AWS – Java (24%), PHP (21%), Azure – C# (54%), Google – Java (35%), Digital Ocean – PHP (29%), Python (22%) and Heroku – Ruby (31%), JavaScript (29%).
In terms of monthly revenue, few make big money, cloud service developers leading followed by the desktop ones. There are many in the mobile (41%) and IoT (59%) markets that are under the “poverty line” set by the study authors at $500/month:
| Monthly rev. | Mobile(%) | Desktop(%) | IoT(%) | Cloud(%) |
| $0 | 19 | 15 | 27 | 15 |
| $1-500 | 32 | 34 | 32 | 28 |
| $500-5,000 | 21 | 22 | 20 | 23 |
| $5-10K | 7 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| $10-50K | 8 | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| $50-500K | 9 | 10 | 5 | 9 |
| $500K+ | 4 | 7 | 4 | 9 |
This edition of the Developer Economic study surveyed over 13,000 developers from 149 countries. For more details on the methodology or the topics covered by the study including Programming Language Preference, IoT involvement, Mobile E-commerce, we recommend downloading the report.