The Eclipse Foundation’s IoT Working Group has released the results of its 2024 IoT Developer Survey. Industrial automation and automotive are now the leading industry sectors and connectivity is the top security concern. 

Inaugurated in 2015 this annual IoT Developer survey is intended to deliver valuable insight into programming languages, platforms, infrastructure and tools for building IoT solutions. Now in its tenth year, the 2024 survey had 747 respondents, comprising developers, committers, architects, and decision makers. This was a decline from 1067 and well below 2019 when there were over 1700 respondents. 

The experience profile of respondents has changed over time. When we last reported its results in 2020, 45% of respondents were newcomers to IoT, with less than 2 years of experience developing IoT solutions and only 21% had more than 5 years. Nowadays the largest group is those with more than 10 years experience and 55% have more than 5 years experience:

Developers are now building IoT solutions across a much wider range of industry sectors. For this chart respondents were asked:

For which industry or industries are you building IoT solutions? (Select all that apply)

Industrial automation tops the list, as it did last year but there has been increased activity in several areas. According to the report:

The growth of IoT and edge solutions is especially noticeable in energy management (29%, up from 24% in 2023) and environment (23%, up from 18% in 2023), as sustainability and efficiency become more critical to developers.

Additionally, the rising focus on healthcare (18%, up from 12% in 2023) and home automation (25%, up from 21% in 2023) highlights the expansion of IoT into sectors tied closely to personal well-being and smart living.

The findings with regard to developers' security concerns and priorities, were that connectivity (48%) has overtaken security (35%) as the leading concern in 2024. Key security measures include communication security (40%), over-the-air updates (32%), and secure boot (19%), which remain primary defenses against threats.

For constrained devices Embedded Linux (46%) and FreeRTOS (29%) lead as RTOS choices for constrained devices. However, the report claims that the growth of Zephyr (21%) and Eclipse ThreadX (13%) indicates a shift toward solutions balancing performance with integration ease.

C (55%), C++ (36%), Python (32%), and Java (29%) are the top programming languages for constrained devices, with Rust showing steady growth in adoption.

When it comes to cloud services AWS has always been the front runner:

Commenting on this the report states: 

Amazon AWS continues to lead, increasing to 45.00% (up from 41% in 2023). Google Cloud Platform saw a slight decline to 19% (from 20%), while Microsoft Azure dropped to 22% (from 27%). Other Private / On-premises cloud saw a sharp increase to 16% (up from 7%), indicating growing interest in private cloud solutions. 

Another thing that hasn't changed is the importance of open source technology. Among the respondents, 75% identified as open source users, up from 63% in 2023. Additionally 24% actively contributing to open source projects as committers which the report notes illustrates a growing commitment to transparent and collaborative development models.

With only 9% claiming no experience with open source IoT/Edge projects, over 90% of respondents either experiment with, use or contribute to open source projects, which seems a pretty healthy state of affairs both for Open Source and for IoT, which needs to be free from proprietary technology in order to thrive.

• Harry Fairhead, I-Programmer's hardware guru, is the author of books about many popular IoT devices including Programming the ESP32 in MicroPython, Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in C and in MicroPython, Master the Raspberry Pi Pico in C: WiFi with lwIP & mbedtls. His earlier books Raspberry Pi IOT in C, Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Drivers, Raspberry Pi IOT in Python with GPIO Zero,  Raspberry Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers and Micro:bit IoT in C have all been updated to the most recent hardware. His books are all part of the I Programmer Library, published by I/O Press.
  

More Information

To download 2024 IoT and Embedded Developer Survey

Eclipse Foundation IoT Developer Survey Results

Related Articles

Eclipse IoT Developer Survey 2019

Eclipse IoT Developer Survey 2018

IoT Developers Gaining In Experience

The IoT - What You Need Know

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