A couple reports published in recent weeks have touched on the topic of the IoT developer community. The first one, from Vision Mobile [1], is entitled IoT Megatrends 2015. Based on research involving over 4,000 IoT developers, Vision Mobile identifies four seismic changes that will shake up the IoT market; one of these changes is that 'everyone can become a developer'.
According to Vision Mobile, this development is quite likely to occur in the consumer portion of the IoT market. This is because IoT platforms, such as Pebble, Razer, Android Wear and Apple WatchKit in the smart-watch segment for example, will evolve in ways that allow developers to orchestrate data streams into valuable scenarios for users. Soon, the ability to manipulate data streams will become so easy that everyone can become a ‘developer’. Or, to use a term that I introduced in an earlier post [2], we should expect a data 'taker' class of user to emerge, paralleling the ‘makers’ of the hardware world.
The second IoT developer survey comes from the Eclipse Foundation [3] and this draws on a small (about a tenth of the Vision Mobile sample) sample of real IoT developers (Eclipse eliminated respondents who did not meet its criteria for IoT developers).
The study author admits to a skewed sample base because of factors such as the channels used to recruit participants. Nevertheless, amongst details about the most popular programming languages, protocols and use of open-source technology there was a surprising revelation about the highly visible industry alliances that are evangelizing interoperability and the IoT market.