Recent research of the global app ecosystem broke down how the landscape has changed in the last year, and as you might expect, Apple turns out pretty well. The survey encompassed the responses of 1,500 developers across 83 countries and 7 mobile platforms (each one with at least 50 developers responding). As a part of the final paper, VisionMobile assembled the above graph which shows just how much Apple is dominating the mobile world on multiple fronts relative to the competition. Sure, Apple may not be taking that much bigger of a chunk of shipments compared to 2011, but the growth in revenues and profits is obviously huge.

The report also uncovered a few other interesting findings, particularly that Windows Phone figures prominently in developer mindshare.

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  • The average per-app revenue is in the range of $1,200-$3,900 per month, depending on platform
  • Irrespective of which platform they primarily use, the majority of developers (57%) plan to adopt Windows Phone
  • Tablets are now a mainstream screen for developers: more than 50% of developers are now targeting tablets, with iOS developers most likely (74%) to do so
  • North America tops app demand with 41% of developers indicating this is a top-3 download region, irrespective of their region of origin

The study also showed that 41% of developers out of a sample of 693 were planning to abandon BlackBerry, irrespective of their main platform. WebOS, by comparison, saw a 50% abandonment rate, which isn't that much higher. Still, BlackBerry topped the average revenue per app per month ($3,853), followed closely by iOS ($3,693). Android tailed at $2,735. Those figures are for the 95% majority of apps; BlackBerry fares pretty well at the upper crust, with 10% making more that $10,000 per app per month, followed by 9% of iOS app developers and 7% of Android developers. The study also examined development costs, and iOS was by far the priciest, clocking in at $27,463 on average, though developers are also most optimistic about revenue potential on iOS.

You can download the whole report from VisionMobile here - it's chock-full of interesting data. Developers, how have you found developing for iOS compared to other platforms? Is there any data here that doesn't jibe with your experience?

Source: InfoWorld