[DZone Research] Environments Developers Target

This post is part of the Key Research Findings in the 2018 DZone Guide to Dynamic Web and Mobile Development. 

Introduction

For this year's DZone Guide to Databases, we surveyed software professionals from across the IT industry. We received 1,202 responses with a 64% completion rating. Based on these numbers, we calculated the margin of error at 3%. In this article, we discuss the browsers developers target and teh emergence of JavaScript as a mobile app development language. 

Browsers Targeted

When it comes to the environments targeted by web developers, one browser proved almost unanimous among respondents. 97% of survey takers reported actively developing for Google’s Chrome browser. The runner up, Mozilla Firefox, is targeted by 64% of developers, followed by Internet Explorer at 41%, Safari at 30%, and Edge at 26%. Clearly, Chrome dominates the landscape of desktop browser-based development efforts. Interestingly, the results prove much the same when we look at the browsers targeted by hybrid application developers. 99% of respondents who develop hybrid applications develop for Chrome, 68% for Mozilla Firefox, 40% for Internet Explorer, 37% for Safari, and 28% for Edge.

JavaScript as a Language for Mobile Development

Hybrid and native application developers target more than just the browser; they also have to worry about how their applications perform on various operating systems. 82% of respondents who develop native or hybrid applications do so for Android and 59% for iOS. Another 25% of native and hybrid app developers focus their efforts on React Native. While the prominence of Android and iOS is unsurprising, the proliferation of React Native as a popular mobile application development framework has led to an increase in the use of JavaScript as a language for mobile development.

When we asked which languages respondents are currently using for building native or hybrid mobile apps, 72% reported using JavaScript and 68% said Java, while there were only 24 write-in responses for Swift (the official language for developing iOS software) and 5 or Objective-C (a popular language for iOS development). When we compare the two main languages, JavaScript and Java, to our data on mobile platforms, an interesting pattern emerges. Among those respondents who develop for Android, 74% use Java and 65% use JavaScript. Among those respondents who develop for iOS, 77% use JavaScript, and 65% use Java. This high-percentage of JavaScript in both Android and iOS development seems due largely to frameworks such as React Native. According to React Native’s documentation, it allows developers to “build a real mobile app that's indistinguishable from an app built using Objective-C or Java.” This most assuredly accounts for the remarkably low use of Swift and Objective-C among this year’s respondents. Diving into this data a little further, though, revels that JavaScript may be more popular as a language for hybrid application development. Among respondents who develop hybrid applications, 87% use JavaScript and 63% use Java. For survey takers who create native mobile apps, 75% use Java and 61% use JavaScript.

Conclusion: React Native Is the Real Deal

Earlier this year, JetBrains released an in-depth developer survey, covering myriad software topics. In that survey, 25% of developers use React Native, making it the fourth most popular framework of their survey. It even beat out Angular, which was reported by 20% of their survey population. That's pretty remarkable, and bodes well for React Native moving forward.

This post is part of the Key Research Findings in the 2018 DZone Guide to Dynamic Web and Mobile Development.