News

Mobile Dev Concerns: Hackers/Malware and Buggy Apps

• By David Ramel
• October 8, 2015

Security concerns continue to be the No. 1 worry in enterprise mobile development projects, a new poll finds, while another study says 75 percent of apps are shipped sporting up to 10 bugs.

A poll of senior IT personnel conducted by enterprise mobility specialist SOTI Inc. finds that most organizations expect the mobility phenomenon to account for almost one-fifth of their IT budgets next year, but such efforts may be held back by security concerns.

"Security concerns top the list of mobile priorities with 69 percent of IT decision-makers citing mobile security, hacking and malware as their number one concern," SOTI announced from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 conference.

Coming in almost tied for second place far behind security concerns were the ability to keep up with rapidly changing technologies (47 percent) and problems with integrating systems, data and applications with existing infrastructure (46 percent).

Other results of the poll of 118 IT leaders conducted by IDG Enterprise on commission from SOTI included:

• 68 percent of respondents stated mobility is critical for the success of their businesses (cited by 74 percent of organizations with more than 1,000 employees).
• 25 percent of enterprises will spend between 20 to 50 percent of their IT budget on mobile technology investments.
• While most organizations' first foray into mobility was BYOD, today, 47 percent are leveraging mobility as the platform to deliver new products and services.
• An additional 45 percent of companies are turning to mobility to drive business process transformation and competitive differentiation.
• 39 percent of businesses are aggressively using mobility as a means to extend their ability to engage with customers and partners.

Meanwhile, a new study from Evans Data Corp. points to a lot of buggy apps being shipped. The developer-focused research firm surveyed more than 500 developers actively working on mobile software projects, finding that almost three-quarters of apps ship with 1 to 10 bugs.

"A third of these developers say that between three and five bugs are found on average after the apps ship, and only five percent say that they typically have zero bugs," the firm said in a news release about its for-sale 2015 Mobile Development Survey (e-mail address required to view table of contents). "Twenty percent average between 11 and 50 bugs, calling into question the efficacy of their testing and QA."

Other data points reported by Evans Data included:

• Seventy percent of iOS developers typically test their apps on up to five devices.
• Two-thirds of Android developers test their apps on between two and four versions of Android.
• Updates -- often containing bug fixes -- are most likely to be pushed out or released on a weekly basis (32 percent) or monthly (22.7 percent).
• Eighty percent of mobile developers say they push out updates at least monthly.

"Bugs have been a fact of life for as long as we've had software," said Evans Data CEO Janel Garvin. "To have just a small handful of bugs is really quite an achievement, but the real advancement is in the constant updating of apps to fix bugs or add additional features. This virtually continuous release of software has changed the dynamic of how developers create and maintain their software."