Big time, full-time professional firms like Rovio and Zynga come to mind when considering app stores, but the largest group of app store developers (41%) are professional developers working in conventional development for their livelihood and writing app store apps in their spare time, according to the newly released Application Distribution Channels study from Evans Data Corp. Full-time professional developers who spend most of their time and get most of their money from app stores account for 26%. Hobbyists (22%) and students (11%) account for the rest.
The study took data from the most recent Evans Data Global Development survey of over 1,400 developers, filtered it for those developing for app stores and then clustered the respondents into four categories based on several factors including percentage of income from stores, percentage of time spent developing for stores and vocational activity.
“With hundreds of thousands of apps available through app stores, it begs the question just who is writing them,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data. “Once the groups are defined, we layer technology adoption data on top to show some interesting differences in the profiled groups in areas such as HTML5 adoption, native vs. web, and specific app store targeting.”
The study is a companion to the 2011 Application Distribution Survey of ISVs which examines technology adoption, app store features, monetization and other aspects of software distribution amongst ISVs.
See complete Table of Contents and sample pages here:
http://evansdata.com/reports/viewRelease.php?reportID=31.
