Developer Satisfaction: Mobile Markets

A crucial part of any developer ecosystem has to do with the way in which developers reach the potential markets of application buyers and users. Understanding what developers need and want as they bring their products to market is just as important to the success of the overall program as the definition of the API or choice of development tools.


At Open-First one of our practice areas is building great development programs - we see this as one of the important new ways that companies engage with their markets. So it is especially interesting to us to understand the mindset of developers around this part of the ecosystem.

In order to benchmark the best (and worst) practices of developer programs we have established a survey of mobile application developers on a monthly basis in order to understand what they like and don’t like about the three major mobile application marketplaces: Nokia’s Ovi Store, Android Marketplace, and Apple’s AppStore. Our goal is to survey a minimum of 100 of the store’s “top” developers as defined by the store itself. Our first report is now available:

Ovi Store Continues to Improve but Significant Challenges Remain

In the coming months we will survey and compare results from Android developers (in August) and Apple developers (in September). Over time we hope to develop an understanding of how these programs compare to each other as well as how each is progressing — we’ll return to Ovi in October and continue to rotate through these three with a new report each month.