Fewer Than 10% of LBS Developers Will Port Apps to Palm & Symbian

Developers of location aware applications are not interested in creating apps for the Palm WebOS or Symbian platforms, according to a survey conducted by Skyhook Wireless, provider of the hybrid location system XPS. High quality location results are key for these developers, who are using location to enable over 20 different types of applications.

Respondents' primary application development environments included iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Symbian. These developers are using location in 21 different types of applications, ranging from education to entertainment, finance to music. Only a few years ago location was most widely used in navigation applications. Today, location capabilities are widely available on smartphones and developers are enhancing these types of applications with the context of current user location.

Seventy three percent of respondents' applications require exact location. Neighborhood level positioning is required by another 19%. Very few want a broader city- (3%) or country-level (5%) approximation. Similarly, 73% of developers agree that very fast location results are important to their application's performance.

"Developers are taking advantage of location in a huge variety of apps," said Kate Imbach, director of marketing and developer programs at Skyhook Wireless. "As developers make plans for investing in new platforms, location capabilities play a big role in their decision criteria."

Over half (56%) of respondents will port their applications to other platforms. 58% of non-Android developers plan to port to that platform, while 40% of non-iPhone developers plan to port their application to the iPhone.

Developers are least interested in Palm and Symbian, with only 8% and 9% of developers planning to port their applications to those platforms, respectively.

The full survey report is available today at http://www.locationrevolution.com/stats/SkyhookDevelopersSurvey2009.pdf

Posted to the site on 8th April 2009