Next week we’ll be releasing our latest survey results and analysis on the mobile development market. As a sneak peek, here’s an interesting statistic that can help marketers tailor both messages and products to mobile developers.
It’s easy for everyone to fall in the trap of picturing mobile development as “development for app stores” and for consumers. And to be clear, a lot of mobile development is for app stores, and is built for consumers.
But as we point out when we talk about developers, it’s easy to overlook the enterprise developer. Yet most developers are enterprise developers.
With that context, this insight from our recent mobile development survey is less surprising, but it’s still an eye-opener.
55% of mobile applications being developed today are for “internal” use — meaning they’re enterprise projects. Remember, the definition of mobile is more than just phones — it encompasses tablets, phones, tablet/laptop hybrids and many different platforms (more on that in another post).
38% of applications are developed for “public” use — which would include app stores and so forth.
That means with all of the millions of mobile apps we know about, there are about one and a half times as many (144%) of those we don’t know about — they’re created for internal use within companies. This, in turn, suggests that there’s a huge untapped market for mobile tools, components and services to help the developers who build these enterprise mobile apps.
Here’s what we learn from this: while we are naturally inclined to think about app store apps as “the mobile things that developers make,” it’s more complex than that. There’s opportunity to help enterprise developers with their internal app development, too. There are problems awaiting solutions; there are untapped market segments. As mobile use continues to increase around the world and in all kinds of vertical, enterprise markets, so, too, does the opportunity for savvy companies and marketers to solve developers’ problems. Don’t overlook enterprise mobile development as a developer need to fulfill!
