Mobile Ecosystem Survey

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This month, I'll share a blog post I wrote for a recent large survey we ran through the Mobile Native Foundation. You may have seen my post on the subject a few weeks ago!

Thank you to everyone who filled out the inaugural MNF Mobile Ecosystem survey; we are excited to share the results with you now!

Overall, we had just over 500 responses, with a roughly even split between iOS and Android: roughly ~40% of responses were for one of these platforms, with the remaining ~20% split amongst several cross-platform options. Interestingly, as a new and cutting-edge field, cross-platform development saw nearly double the interest level from Android engineers than from iOS engineers (~85% vs. ~40%).?

As shown in the pie chart below, about 60% of responses were from individuals working at companies with less than 50 mobile engineers, contrasted with over 80% of responses coming from companies with 100 total employees or more. This shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, that mobile engineers typically form a relatively small percentage of a company's overall headcount.

We received responses from around the world, which aligns with the remote work preferences of respondents: over 65% are either fully remote or remote and occasionally go in for specific events. On the other hand, only 7% of responses were from people going into an office 5 days a week. It will be interesting to observe how this shifts over time, and a bummer we didn't run this survey before COVID to see the drastic shift that must've brought to these results!

Generally, iOS is neutral to positive in sentiment towards the App Store (~60% neutral+positive). In comparison, Android is more positive towards the Play Store (~80% neutral+positive), but in the comments, a lot are taking issue with the difficulty of working with App Store rejections that sometimes seem random or targeted. There are a lot of folks also unhappy about the 30% cut that these platforms take.

In the open-ended comment section where we asked for potential questions you all wished we had asked, many wanted the survey to dig deeper into cross-platform development. Others also wanted more sentiment-based free-response questions. While only one comment mentioned the survey was too long, we will likely have to remove some questions to make room for more in the next iteration, so we can keep the time it takes to complete manageable for everyone! A third thing that came up in these comments was around consultants and how the survey was not crafted well for someone in that role. Thank you for the feedback, and we will work to address this excellent observation going forward.

Lastly, when digging deeper into the infrastructure layer of mobile, nearly 85% of all responses were from those working at companies with less than 50 mobile platform/infrastructure engineers. Perhaps this explains why ~20% of respondents didn't know the cold start time for their app, and another ~50% have a cold start time longer than 1s.

These are just an initial set of highlights from this survey’s results, you can see all results at this link . We welcome further analysis and will include it alongside the results if shared – so please share your thoughts with us! Furthermore, this is just the first time we have run this survey, but we aim to run this yearly, so stay tuned for the next iteration!

You can see this post, and all results at this Github page . Wishing everyone a great end of the year, and you can expect the next edition to be published in January! If you have specific topics you'd like me to write about, please don't hesitate to let me know ??