In November 2015 the results from an extensive mobile maturity survey were announced. The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Red Hat.

The key results are interesting:

• 90 percent of respondents anticipate increasing investment in mobile application development within the next 12 months
• the same respondents see their investment for mobile application development increasing at an average growth rate of 24 percent during the next 12 months
• In practice the respondents plan to develop on average 21 custom apps each over the next two years – that is a 40 percent increase over the average number of custom apps they developed in the last two years

Mobile Backend as a Service cloud technology (MBaaS) stood also out in the results.

Authentication, push notifications, social media integrations, geospatial queries, offline sync and analytics are examples of these common challenges that the ready-made backend features solve for mobile developers. By using MBaaS you can focus on your app and the UX instead of spending time with the infrastructure and backend code.

The results show that about one third of the respondents already use MBaaS and this number is slowly growing. The growth isn’t explosive, but MBaaS platforms are a new and relatively unused platform offering.

However in 2016 MBaaS is such an adjusted technology to be utilized that you need to take it into account. The possibilities to use it have to be evaluated in the planning phase of each mobile app. If you can use it the benefits are notable.

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Mobile maturity survey:
http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/90-percent-respondents-red-hat-survey-plan-increase-mobile-app-development-investments-2016

Why Azure Mobile Apps beats Amazon’s and Google’s MBaaS platforms according to Martin Heller:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890167/application-development/review-microsoft-azure-beats-amazon-and-google-for-mobile-development.html