Survey reveals enterprise spending on mobile app development remains low as mobile accounts for only 10 percent of overall application development budgets
Forty-two percent of organizations expect to increase spending on mobile app development by an average of 31 percent in 2016, according to a recent survey by Gartner. Despite this, the average proportion of the overall application development budget allocated to mobile is only 10 percent, a 2 percent decrease from 2015.
The Gartner survey of IT and business leaders responsible for mobile strategy and/or custom mobile app development within their organizations was conducted in September 2015 across the United States, EMEA, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. The survey focused on understanding organizations’ activities in mobile app development, covering both business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) apps.
The survey revealed that the majority of enterprises developing mobile apps are focused on custom mobile app development, rather than customizing configurable apps or building from off-the-shelf templates. Gartner believes that given most development teams use custom app development for all of their apps, extending this to mobile is a natural behavior. Additionally, many off-the-shelf mobile apps still require significant development activity to integrate the back-end databases and applications into the mobile app front ends.
According to Gartner, the range of mobile apps in use across the enterprise varies among user groups and lines of business in terms of the apps’ adherence to corporate and security policies.
Adrian Leow, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner said, “Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn’t yet appear to be a priority for most organizations. This must change particularly given employees often have the autonomy to choose the devices, apps and even the processes to complete a task. This places an increasing amount of pressure on IT to develop a larger variety of mobile apps in shorter time frames. If developers have to spend 70 percent of their time getting the integration right, they shouldn’t have to make compromises on the front end by constraints inherent in prepackaged mobile apps. The selection of prepackaged mobile apps is also still quite limited from many providers.”
