At Mozilla, we are dedicated to keep the web open and independent of a single company or technology. This means that users should have a choice of browsers and technology to use to go online and should not be blocked out because they can’t afford a certain device or are forbidden to change their browser.
In the world of mobile web development there is currently a massive debate going on about the need for support of various browsers seeing that the most successful phone systems both use the same browser engine. This is good, and we need this debate. It is not good though when developers block out users because they concentrate on targetting a browser. Sometimes this is not by choice of the developer – they are simply using tools that do that blocking for them and the usefulness of the tool outweighs the qualms developers have about that.
We are now planning to talk to library and tool developers and help them support more than one browser engine to prevent this. As a start of that process we wanted to get a glimpse of what people are using right now so we make sure we have the most impact when we help. This is why we started a quick online survey asking developers about their tools for mobile development.
We are happy to report that to date we have 480 answers and it is time to take a first stab at looking at the data.
We are very aware that this is *not* a scientifically clean research and should be taken with a grain of salt (we haven’t asked how many times people used the tools or how much of their work is building mobile apps) but it gives us a good first glimpse at what makes most sense for us to do.
So without further ado, here are the raw numbers as charts:
Platforms
Not many surprises there, iOS and Android are in the lead, quite a lot of people see the web as a must-have (but this is a survey called out by Mozilla…) and Blackberry and Windows Mobile are not that hight on people’s radar.
What platforms are you targeting with your apps – iOS
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What platforms are you targeting with your apps – Android
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What platforms are you targeting with your apps – Blackberry
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What platforms are you targeting with your apps – Web
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What platforms are you targeting with your apps – Windows phone
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Libraries
jQuery rules supreme but Sencha touch and Zepto also have their place. Interestingly enough a lot of answers discarded libraries completely and considered them an overhead that will cause damage in the future.
What libraries do you use to build mobile web apps/sites?
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People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
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Conversion frameworks
You do love your PhoneGap / Cordova, it seems. There is not too much competition in this market and a lot of feedback was questioning the sense of converting apps as “building them natively makes more sense”.
Which frameworks do you use to convert apps to native apps?
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People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
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Visual editors
The space of visual editors seems to be not to frequented with this audience – would be interesting to see if there is already a mass market for WYSIWYG-like tools in the web app space.
Do you use any visual tools/converters to build apps? If so, which?
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People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
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Webkit only?
71% of the audience saying they test on other browsers than webkit is making us happy of course, but seeing that a lot of the tools in use are webkit only makes that number questionable. Then again, we didn’t qualify what testing entices in this case.
Do you test on non-Webkit browsers?
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Reasons to test for webkit only
The main reason here is a lack of time to test on other platforms which is understandable – we can assume that a lot of projects from a planning perspective have 99% iOS/Android written all over them. The “lack of incentive” number is high, too, which is understandable – if you can’t show the numbers, you don’t get the time to support.
If no, can you tell us why?
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People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.
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More to come
These are just the numbers right now. Soon we’ll be publishing also the free-form comments we got but for now this should get some discussion going and gives us a great start.
And finally – a massive thank you for everybody who participated in this survey!
About Chris Heilmann
Evangelist for HTML5 and open web. Let's fix this!
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