Mozilla has released the results of its mobile developer survey. The intention was to investigate whether the mobile web was ‘broken’, because of the dominance of iOS and Android, along with assumptions made by tool providers on behalf of developers.
In all, 590 developers took part, revealing they most heavily focus on the web, iOS and Android, and are seemingly not concerned about Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Other results showcased jQuery and PhoneGap’s dominance, respectively, in JavaScript libraries and conversion frameworks.
The survey also asked developers if they only targeted and tested on WebKit browsers for mobile, to which 71 per cent said they did not. Nonetheless, Mozilla discovered most developers do prefer WebKit, "not because of its features but because of general speed and availability reasons that are reliant on operating systems and hardware".
Christian Heilmann, principal evangelist at Mozilla, told us there weren’t any big surprises in the findings, but there were things of interest: “For example, the massive use of jQuery vs jQuery Mobile, especially seeing how many developers complain that jQuery is getting too big. And I also found it interesting that lack of time to support multiple platforms is a bigger reason to only support WebKit instead of fixed-client needs. You could deduce this means we are bad at giving time estimates or that it is not that simple to get the first build out that only works on WebKit. This would be interesting to compare with the amount of time spent if you covered all browsers first and then optimised for WebKit."
