iOS Developer Survey
The iOS Developer Community Survey is the largest public survey of Apple platform developers ever undertaken. Data collection happened over four weeks between 6th December 2019 and the 7th January 2020. In that month, 2,290 people filled in the questionnaire. This site presents the raw data collected, along with analysis and opinion based on that data.
Almost 70% of people are writing 100% of their personal/hobby Apple platform code in Swift. Given that company/team restrictions and the impact of an existing codebase is much less of an issue in personal/hobby projects. I think this question is a good indicator of developer interest in the language, and what this tells me is that Swift is dominating.
When it comes to apps written for a company, you might expect the number to fall. It does, but not by much.
Larger companies seem to use more Swift than smaller ones.
An average satisfaction of 8.3 is obviously very high, even more so when you think of how critical we developers can be about the languages we use!
[…]
But I believe there are some slightly worrying signals revealed by this question. Only ~66% of people think that Swift is in good hands at Apple? Only ~59% of people believe that the evolution process is working well?
I’m generally like how the language has been evolving, but the progress on tooling and reliability have been frustrating.
The most interesting questions to me are that 75.5% say that they have a “Completely separate/independent codebases for each mobile platform” (I expected much lower) and that 60% say they would use SwiftUI in a new app to ship soon (also expected lower).
Interest in Mac development seems to be low, and respondents who were interested in Mac development preferred Catalyst and SwiftUI to AppKit, which does not bode well for the quality of future apps.
Apple has been talking a lot about machine learning and augmented reality and adding lots of stuff to the frameworks, but interest seems relatively low.
42% of apps were completely free or donationware, with 21% using subscriptions.
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I have a stupid question when trying to analyze the answers for Q24, Q95 and Q96:
Why isn't there a question about how much the iOS business contributes directly to the income?
Because I have troubles matching the fact that only 12.9% of the respondents earned less than $10,000 creating "apps" in the last month when 40% of the business apps are free and 94.5% of the personal/hobby app are making less than $10,000 a year.
