The demand for employee apps from enterprises has led to a marked shift in the types of apps being built. Developers moving to tablets as the emerging app platform, with most developers placing equal priority on tablets and smartphones.

These findings come from the Q2 2013 Mobile Developer Report, reporting a survey of 6,046 Appcelerator Titanium developers conducted by Appcelerator and IDC in April 2013. With three years of survey data now available the report presents some interesting historical trends that show a decline over time in the number of consumer-facing (Business-to-Customer) apps being built and a rise in the demand for enterprise-related apps:

Looking at the interest in various mobile development platforms, iOS is clearly the preferred alternative with approaching 90% of respondents saying they are very interested in developing for iPhone with almost as many for iPad. Interest in developing for the Android Phone has declined from its peak in 2011 and now 78% of developers are very interested in it, but despite the increasing availability of Android tablets only 66% of developers are keen on it and only around 22% very interested in the Kindle Fire. HTML5 has also decined from last year's 75% interest to 65%.

There is almost equal interest in Windows Phones and Tablets but at around 35% its still pretty dismal. Interest in Blackberry has picked up from its in November 2012 but is still sub 10% for the Playbook and around 12% for the phone. Firefox OS has had an encouraging debut at around 25% but Tizen, the other newcomer is around 5%.

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On the whole developers show roughly equal interest in smartphone and tablet forms, with 84% targeting smartphone and 81% targeting tablets. Android being the exception to this and this fits with the trend towards enterprise apps since businesses are less likely to commission Android apps than ones for iOS, Windows and Blackberry platforms.