Developers vs. Low-Code—What They Think and Why

A new Progress survey of 5,565 web and mobile application developers reveals their daily challenges and how low-code app development platforms could help.

Businesses need more consumer-grade apps every day, and time to market is crucial to remain competitive. Developers of all stripes are being asked to deliver more applications faster than ever before and they’re calling for tools and platforms to help them keep pace.

We recently took a survey of 5,565 web and mobile application developers to learn the challenges they were facing in their work and what they needed from a low-code app development platform to be more productive. Here are some brief highlights from our survey.

The Big Challenge—Deliver More Apps and Do It Quickly

Survey respondents indicated that most development teams are being asked to deliver more than one web or mobile app over the next 12 months. This represents a significant demand for apps being delivered by professional developers, with 57% delivering two or more per year. It’s more than reasonable to conclude that the demand for apps will only continue to escalate—further stressing the capabilities of current development teams.

The Apps They Build and the Tools They Use

The survey data shows that external-facing apps are more commonly delivered than internal LOB apps. That distribution is even greater for mobile-specific teams. Developer control over the user experience becomes critical in this class of applications.

For cross-platform development, Angular 1.x and 2+ are the most popular JavaScript frameworks in enterprise development, followed by React. When looking at larger organizations with more than 500 employees, the percentage of web developers building on Angular (2+) is 44%, AngularJS (1.x) is 45%, React is 38% and Vue is 29%.

What Do Developers Need to Help Them Meet Demand?

Free text survey responses indicated that the need for faster application delivery doesn’t vary based on company size in terms of employees or considering the number of apps to be delivered in the next 12 months. The two biggest “asks” to speed application development and delivery from both web and mobile developers were tools and platforms.

Conclusion on Low-Code for Coders

Developer talent is scarce, so organizations need to enable the developers they have with tools and platforms, while fostering a culture that can retain and attract talent. Developer sentiment and extended application delivery teams should be considered when making top-down decisions on app strategy.

What would help you deliver apps faster?  “Common code for all mobile platforms with native UI support.” —Survey Respondent

Low-Code for pro developers is really about writing once and running across platforms, while maintaining control over the user experience. Existing JavaScript, Angular and Vue developer teams can rapidly deliver native mobile apps faster by using NativeScript, an open source framework that allows significant code reuse between web and mobile tiers. For React developers, React Native is the equivalent cross-platform framework to NativeScript.

Download our whitepaper, “Low-Code Platforms—What Developers Think and Why”, which examines the survey results in depth, and its companion infographic. The critical questions both resources seek to answer for application strategy leaders include:

1. How are professional web and mobile dev teams organized across industries?
2. What talent is delivering these apps and what are their preferences?
3. What are the biggest challenges in app delivery according to pro developers?
4. How do existing pro developers feel about low-code strategies?
5. Where are the opportunities to improve application development strategies?

Explore the latest innovation from Progress around high productivity application development suitable for the full range of professional developers:

Progress Kinvey is a high productivity app platform for professional developers that delivers low-code development processes on a serverless architecture, built-in microservices frameworks, out-of-the-box enterprise integrations, intelligent offline capabilities, cloud cache and security. Developer control is powered by NativeScript, an open source framework for building native mobile apps with Angular, Vue.js, TypeScript, or JavaScript.