Magic Quadrant for Mobile App

Development Platforms
Published 17 July 2018 - ID G00335713 - 62 min read

Mobile app and web development technologies and practices have

converged to support digital business. Application leaders must use
MADPs to extend support for multiexperience development across
mobile, web, conversational and immersive touchpoints. This report
will help them select the right vendor.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2021, at least one-third of enterprises will have deployed a multiexperience
development platform to support mobile, web, conversational and augmented-reality
development.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines a mobile app development platform (MADP) as a product or suite that
offers tools, technologies, components and services that constitute the critical elements
of a platform to create mobile apps (.ipa and .apk binary files), as well as responsive
web, conversational, wearable or augmented reality (AR) apps.
A MADP serves to centralize life cycle activities — designing, developing, testing,
distributing, managing and analyzing — for a portfolio of mobile and multiexperience
apps running on a range of operating systems, devices and touchpoints.
A MADP must include:

 Cross-platform front-end development tools.

 Back-end services that must be decoupled from the vendor's proprietary tools in order
to support third-party and open-source integrated development environment (IDEs),
tools and frameworks.
 The ability to address the requirements of diverse enterprise use cases, including
external-facing and internal-facing scenarios, as well as connecting to diverse
enterprise systems that may run on-premises or in the cloud.
The MADP was first defined by Gartner in 2012 as a platform for addressing and
consolidating enterprise mobile app development projects across business-to-employee
(B2E), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) app use cases.
Today, MADPs are still primarily used to address those diverse mobile app
requirements, but they also increasingly support responsive web app development,
conversational channels, wearables and immersive devices (see "Technology Insight for
Multiexperience Development Platforms").
This year, we have raised the inclusion threshold for execution, based on the maturation
of mobile app development and the emerging evolution of multiexperience
development. As a result, there are fewer Leaders than in the prior Magic Quadrant. But
there are more Visionaries, which reflects vendors' varying approaches to the shifting
expectations and requirements of buyers. There are no Challengers in this Magic
Quadrant, as last year's Challengers still have lingering product gaps or inconsistent or
incomplete execution in relation to their product roadmaps, and have become Niche
Players.

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms
Source: Gartner (July 2018)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
ApiOmat
A new entrant to the Magic Quadrant, ApiOmat is a Niche Player. The company
markets its MADP offering as a platform on which to create mobile apps and digital
services and connect them to legacy tools, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and cloud
resources. With fewer than 40 paying customers, ApiOmat has one of the smaller
MADP customer bases.
ApiOmat's platform can be used to create multiexperience apps for mobile devices,
smartwatches and the web. In addition, developers can use ApiOmat SDKs to build
 other digital touchpoints, including AR/virtual reality (VR) headsets, voice assistants
(Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) and chatbots. Multiexperience apps run on its
internal MongoDB database, with integrated back-end systems or cloud services to
ensure consistency across touchpoints developed using ApiOmat Studio, which is an
OEM version of a third-party front-end development tool. ApiOmat Studio generates
native code for Apple Xcode and Android Studio. Alternatively, SDKs can be integrated
into any IDE, such as Eclipse, Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA, by importing the source
code. ApiOmat Studio generates RESTful APIs for each data model created. HTTP
caching and streaming mechanisms are included to support files (such as MP3 and
video files). Offline handling and delta synchronization are also supported.

Strengths

 Core back-end services: ApiOmat has a module system for creating custom logic.
Modules can be used to integrate other systems and APIs, create mashups and write
back-end-specific business logic. They are often used to create complex data
orchestrations for various systems developed using Java and Kotlin.
 Customer experience: Reference customers expressed above-average satisfaction with
ApiOmat's developer training and support and its professional services.
 Management capabilities: ApiOmat provides a "SuperAdmin" dashboard to grant
granular access rights to individual back-end services and access to a detailed audit
log. Organizations can use the SuperAdmin to develop and manage applications for
customers, partners and employees.

Cautions

 Marketing and sales execution: As ApiOmat's customer base and partner network are
still relatively small, usage of its module marketplace is limited. This makes it more
difficult for customers and partners to justify the time and resources required to create
and sell new modules that would grow the ApiOmat ecosystem.
 Innovation: ApiOmat's roadmap highlights capabilities for building decentralized
applications on a blockchain. Gartner, however, finds that blockchain technologies are
still emerging and unproven in terms of scalable production-ready projects. Most
enterprise blockchain projects never progress beyond the proof-of-concept stage.
 Overall viability: ApiOmat has a relatively small customer base, primarily in Europe, and
is at the lower end of the revenue range represented by other vendors evaluated in this
Magic Quadrant and in the broader MADP market.

Appian
Appian re-enters this Magic Quadrant as a Niche Player. The company markets itself as
a provider of a high-productivity development platform with a deep background in
business process management (BPM). In the past year, it has revamped its mobile app
development capabilities. Appian became a publicly traded company in 2017 and has
 over 350 customers, most being large enterprises and government or noncommercial
entities.
The Appian platform takes a model-driven approach to building web and mobile apps
through its web-based Designer IDE. It employs the Appian Self-Assembling Interface
Layer (SAIL) framework for rendering apps across channels, and relies on React Native
for its mobile container and React (JavaScript) for the web. For mobile back-end
services, Appian provides only web APIs for third-party development tools to access
back-end services, including push notifications, identity management and location
service. The platform runs on the Appian Cloud. It also supports Docker and
Kubernetes, and can be deployed on-premises. Appian is most suited to mobile use
cases for employee-facing apps, particularly ones requiring a high degree of process
automation and case management workflow support.

Strengths

 Pricing: Mobile licensing is included as part of the overall Appian platform license. As a

result, reference customers reported above-average satisfaction with Appian's software-
licensing policy and identified pricing as a key reason for using its MADP.
 High-productivity app-building tool: Appian takes a unified model-driven approach to
web and mobile app development via its Designer IDE, which maximizes reuse through
the use of templates, components, shared logic and rules. It also offers a Quick Apps
builder with a wizard-based interface for creating simpler apps. Reference customers
gave this capability above-average scores.
 Process, workflow and data modeling: Based on its BPM foundation, Appian provides a
core engine with business rules, processes and data services. Its platform has robust
support for complex process-routing logic. Processes and workflows can be created and
stored within a specific application object.

Cautions

 Professional developer enablement tools: Appian's platform lacks SDKs to support

popular third-party mobile development frameworks, such as Xamarin, Apache Cordova
and React Native. Appian's SAIL UI architecture does provide prebuilt components for
common UI controls, but does not support third-party-developed native components.
 Product offering: Unlike most MADPs, the ability to create fully customized mobile app
binaries is not built into Appian's Designer IDE. The process requires a submission
through a developer portal to request building of a branded app. This limits the
suitability for customer-facing apps deployed via public app stores. None of the
surveyed reference customers used Appian for this purpose.
 Marketing strategy: Appian's marketing of its MADP capabilities takes a back seat to its
highlighting of the platform's BPM and low-code capabilities. Most of its marketing
messaging is geared toward certain industries. Consequently, awareness of its platform
within the broad mobile developer ecosystem is limited.
 Betty Blocks
Betty Blocks makes its debut in this Magic Quadrant as a Niche Player. The company
positions itself as a provider of a cloud-native, high-productivity development platform
for web and mobile apps. Betty Blocks is one of the smallest vendors in this Magic
Quadrant in terms of revenue and employees, but has a growing base of over 200
paying customers.
The Betty Blocks platform uses a drag-and-drop interface and takes a visual-modeling
approach to building web and mobile apps through a web-based IDE. It uses the
Apache Cordova framework for building mobile apps. Ionic UI frameworks can be used
for richer UI controls. Back-end services, such as content and identity services, are
accessible only via web APIs for third-party development tools. The Betty Blocks
platform runs on its own cloud, with locations in the Netherlands and the U.S. It can also
be deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in private clouds with Docker
containers. Betty Blocks primarily serves small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and
departments within large enterprises, within which it aims at citizen developers.

Strengths

 High-productivity app-building tool: Betty Blocks' no-code development tool offers an

intuitive approach to constructing web and mobile apps using visual UI building and
data modeling. As a result, reference customers reported fast time to deployment and
above-average satisfaction with its tool, although they were less satisfied with the
developer training and support.
 Customer experience: Reference customers indicated above-average overall
satisfaction with Betty Blocks' MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this
Magic Quadrant. They also expressed above-average satisfaction with integration and
deployment. All of this vendor's reference customers reported that deployments took
less than three months.
 Sales execution: Betty Blocks had one of the highest rates of customer acquisition in
2017. It markets itself very aggressively and offers very competitive prices. Reference
customers reported high levels of satisfaction with their licensing and sales negotiations.

Cautions

 Core mobile back-end services: Betty Blocks' platform has immature mobile back-end
services. It has no native push notification capability and limited offline data
synchronization capability, with no data conflict resolution and only a "mobile client
always wins" model. Performance analytics capabilities are minimal. There are no "out
of the box" mobile app analytics capabilities. Custom logic that cannot be created in its
platform model must be integrated from a third-party service.
 UI richness and native OS API support: Betty Blocks relies entirely on the open-source
Apache Cordova framework community to support native OS plug-ins and extensions. It
 does not provide its own plug-ins or curate a marketplace in which customers and
partners can contribute theirs (as do other MADP vendors that use Cordova).
 Product strategy: As a new entrant to the MADP market, Betty Blocks has to catch up
with many of the established vendors. Because it focuses on no-code development and
citizen developers, it lacks the platform tools and capabilities to support professional
developers in the mobile sector.

DSI
DSI is a Niche Player (it was a Challenger in the previous Magic Quadrant). It focuses
on supply chain organizations that want to deploy apps to mobile devices and that have
plans for additional touchpoints, such as ones using AR. DSI's customer base is fairly
large, with nearly 2,000 paying MADP customers. There is fairly equal representation
across different sizes of organization, but only a small number deploy DSI's product in
the cloud.
DSI uses a web-based IDE, Application Studio, to provide a "what you see is what you
get," drag-and-drop approach to mobile app development. Application Studio offers low-
code functionality, and gives professional developers the ability to create more complex
experiences. It enables development of mobile and web apps, and has some
functionality to support chatbots and wearables. DSI's approach offers a common UI
across touchpoints, as opposed to individual UIs designed to take advantage of the
specific capabilities of different types of device. For example, mobile web and native
mobile apps developed using its software have the same look and feel, with the main
difference being the addition of native device capabilities to the mobile apps.

Strengths

 Overall viability: DSI is a privately owned company with a large and stable customer
base. It has been profitable for over 15 years.
 Industry strategy: DSI focuses on supply chain use cases and has done a good job of
strategically positioning and growing its products for that purpose. DSI plays to its
strengths in this industry and has achieved success with this strategy.
 Innovation: DSI has allocated almost one-third of its revenue to research and
development. Over the past year, this has led to improved cloud support, hands-free AR
applications, and more analytics offerings through an OEM arrangement with Domo.

Cautions

 Marketing and sales execution: Although DSI has done a good job of targeting the
supply chain sector, this focus makes DSI a Niche Player — not a good choice for
broader use cases. DSI had one of the lowest rates of new customer acquisition growth
in 2017.
 Product strategy: DSI focuses its capabilities on mobilizing internal supply chain use
cases. Therefore, its capabilities for other use cases across lines of business are
 limited. Furthermore, its focus on delivering a "single user experience" across
multiexperience apps does not take account of the uniqueness of each individual
experience and touchpoint. Also, DSI does not guarantee 100% support for native iOS
and Android APIs.
 Customer experience: Reference customers indicated below-average overall
satisfaction with DSI's MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this Magic
Quadrant. In particular, its professional services and customer service and support were
scored below-average.

GeneXus
GeneXus is a Niche Player (it was a Challenger in the previous Magic Quadrant). Based
in Uruguay, the company retains a significant customer base in South America, where it
serves process-centric use cases using a low-code approach. GeneXus receives most
of its licensing revenue from partners. It has over 1,900 paying customers (a large
portion being SMBs) for the platform.
The GeneXus model-driven platform creates native apps for iOS and Android using a
high-productivity development approach. Alternatively, professional developers can use
GeneXus' proprietary IDE to edit code directly (GeneXus does not recommend this
approach, however, as changes may be lost when the platform refactors apps). The
platform supports a wide range of endpoint devices and integrates with IoT solutions. It
can be deployed on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Red Hat, and it supports
deployment and management of containers. Despite these capabilities, the vast majority
of GeneXus' customers run its platform on-premises.

Strengths

 Overall viability: GeneXus has been in business for 30 years and benefits from a
customer base that tends to retain its platform. In addition to its home market, GeneXus
has had success in Japan (but a recent expansion into North America has yet to yield
similar results).
 Pricing: GeneXus has a straightforward developer-license-based pricing plan, which is
transparent and easy for customers to understand. This strength was reflected in a high
satisfaction score from reference customers for its software licensing and contract
negotiations.
 High-productivity app-building tool: GeneXus has a strong track record with its high-
productivity development approach for a variety of app use cases and industries. It also
has good support for visual process modeling and workflow design capabilities.

Cautions

 Sales execution: GeneXus' sales growth is at the lower end of the range represented by
vendors in this Magic Quadrant. This may reflect its maturity in the South American
market, combined with its struggle to enter some other geographic markets. GeneXus
 has opened a U.S. office, but Gartner has not seen any significant increase in the North
American market's awareness of this vendor.
 Operations: GeneXus has a relatively small number of engineers and full-time
employees, given the number of years it has been in business and the number of
customers it has. Operationally, it relies heavily on partners for sales and
implementation services, which means customers may not have as direct a relationship
with GeneXus as they would with other MADP vendors.
 Marketing execution: There is little awareness of GeneXus in the global MADP market.
It has been unable to gain traction outside Latin America, save for Japan (which has
unique market requirements). Additionally, GeneXus' average deal size is relatively
small.

IBM
IBM is a Niche Player (it was a Challenger in the previous Magic Quadrant). IBM
continues to refocus its platform on back-end services. In 2017, it changed the name of
its MADP from IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation to IBM Mobile Foundation (the on-
premises offering) and IBM Mobile Services on IBM Cloud (the cloud-native offering).
With clients across the world, IBM has one of the largest MADP customer bases, thanks
partly to its partnership with Apple for native iOS development through the IBM Services
organization.
IBM Mobile Foundation provides an Eclipse IDE plug-in that confers the ability to design
a mobile app and that generates JQuery-based hybrid apps using Apache Cordova.
IBM also offers starter kits on IBM Cloud Mobile Dashboard and a wide variety of SDKs
for native Universal Windows Platform (UWP), iOS and Android, as well as Apache
Cordova, Xamarin and React Native. Along with robust mobile services for, for example,
geolocation, security and push notifications, IBM Mobile Foundation's adapters can
transform and compress back-end responses in any format into mobile-optimized
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) payloads. IBM's platform supports Docker,
Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry deployment options.

Strengths

 Core mobile services: Much of the value that IBM's MADP delivers to customers comes
from its robust and comprehensive back-end services, for which reference customers
gave some of the highest scores in the Magic Quadrant survey. They also identified the
platform's security capabilities as a key reason for purchasing it.
 Professional developer enablement tools: In addition to IBM's Eclipse IDE plug-in for
developing hybrid mobile apps, IBM offers professional developers the choice of many
SDKs to use in their IDE of choice. IBM's platform is particularly appealing to native iOS
developers, due to IBM's partnership with Apple and deep platform support for iOS.
 Sales execution: IBM secured many new MADP customers in 2017. Reference
customers gave IBM above-average satisfaction scores for its licensing model (which is
 app- or device-based), contract negotiation, and meeting of expectations set during the
sales process.

Cautions

 Marketing strategy and execution: Over the past two years, IBM has moved away from
its MobileFirst branding. It has also moved its platform to the IBM Cloud as IBM Mobile
Services. These moves have caused some confusion in the market about IBM's mobile
strategy. Gartner has seen instances of the older Worklight branding still being used,
and some clients are unsure of the status of IBM products, particularly for deployment
on-premises.
 High-productivity app development tool: IBM has chosen not to focus on tools to support
high-productivity development or to address the low-code needs of professional and
citizen developers. Instead, it has partnerships with Kinetise, Ionic and Mendix to
support use of their high-productivity development tools on its platform, but this entails
separate product roadmaps and additional purchases by customers.
 Business model: Adoption of IBM's platform has been driven mainly by requirements for
custom Apple iOS app development and the efforts of IBM Services. This heavy
reliance on professional services contrasts with that of MADP vendors that provide tools
especially for developers to speed up deployment. Reference customers reported
deployment times for IBM that were longer than the average for vendors in this Magic
Quadrant.

i-exceed
I-exceed is again a Niche Player. The company markets its MADP offering as a high-
productivity, microapp-based platform on which to build multiexperience apps. I-
exceed's customer base is very small (at fewer than 80 customers), compared with
other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, but it has doubled its number of paying
customers since the previous Magic Quadrant.
I-exceed's Appzillon Development Platform provides a cloud environment in which to
build iOS and Android apps. It supports generation of these app binary files on a user's
workstation, provided the native iOS and Android SDKs are installed on that
workstation. Front-end client development is supported via JavaScript, with Java
customization available on the server side. Appzillon uses static templates within which
developers can drag and drop "widgets" to build a screen. Most of the prebuilt
connectors available are for financial industry data sources, such as Flexcube, Finacle,
Euronet and FIS.

Strengths

 Customer experience: I-exceed's reference customers were all able to deploy their

solution in less than six months, with more than half doing so in under three months.
They expressed above-average satisfaction with i-exceed's developer training and
support (but below-average satisfaction with integration and deployment).
 High-productivity app-building tool: I-exceed's Appzillon platform uses a multitier
microapp-based architecture to break down the app development process into logical
and functional building blocks. This helps reduce the time required for development and
testing.
 Core back-end services and API mediation: I-exceed's Appzillon platform provides end-
to-end automation capability for building apps from enterprise application services by
importing service definitions associated with enterprise services and data stores. It then
automatically creates the data model and the default UI.

Cautions

 Product strategy: Nearly all of i-exceed's customers are from the banking, finance and
insurance industry. This has prompted the company to narrow Appzillon to the needs of
these businesses, as is shown by its banking-specific microapps and accelerators.
 Sales strategy: Very few of i-exceed's offices, support staff, resellers and delivery
partners are located outside Asia/Pacific. Although i-exceed plans further expansion into
North America and EMEA, corresponding sales are not yet evident due to these
resource limitations.
 Overall viability: I-exceed's revenue is at the lower end of the range represented by
vendors in this Magic Quadrant and the overall MADP market. Given i-exceed's focus
on one industry and limited expansion outside Asia/Pacific, prospective customers
should check its suitability for their needs and the availability of in-region resources to
enable implementation and provide support.

Kony
Kony is again a Leader. One of the original MADP vendors, Kony continues to expand
the capabilities of its platform in the web app development arena, and therefore has
emerged as a competitor in the high-productivity application platform as a service
(hpaPaaS) segment. Kony has a healthy number of MADP customers (over 550), half of
them being large enterprises.
Kony's MADP comprises Kony Visualizer (a front-end IDE), Kony Fabric (back-end
services) and Kony Nitro Engine (a multichannel engine). Kony Visualizer gives
developers the ability to create a rich, interactive user experience for mobile apps within
a high-productivity tool, which also includes a development environment for professional
developers. A free version of the Kony platform is available on AWS; it includes both
front-end tools and back-end hosted services and integration capabilities. The platform
can also be deployed on Azure and other cloud platforms. It offers strong support for
IoT implementations. It also offers API monitoring and has a strong suite of prebuilt
integrations with the most popular back-end applications. Additionally, Kony has
integrated analytics, both performance-monitoring and behavioral. Finally, the platform
has an object layer that lets developers work with sample datasets and then easily
switch to production data.

Strengths
 Product offering: Kony's MADP offers one of the most comprehensive cross-platform
development environments. Reference customers indicated above-average overall
satisfaction with Kony's MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this Magic
Quadrant. In addition, Kony Fabric back-end services are very competitive in the overall
application platform as a service (aPaaS) market, spanning both web and mobile
development.
 Market understanding: Kony continues to add capabilities beyond mobile apps that
support some of the key functions demanded by the market, such as conversational and
AI-driven capabilities. The company has also enhanced its training enablement with
Kony Base Camp, an online community for developers.
 Industry strategy: Kony has strong partnerships with industry partners like CDW,
Diebold Nixdorf, SoftBank and Tech Data (Avnet), which have given it new access to
financial services, retail, energy/utilities and healthcare markets. Kony also offers
prepackaged digital banking SaaS applications on top of its platform, which enable it to
target business buyers in the banking sector.

Cautions

 Business model: Kony's use of channel partners to deliver growth has had mixed
results. For different reasons, Kony has, in the past, struggled with partnerships (such
as that with Cognizant). Kony must overcome this problem and refocus on partnerships
with regional system integrators and OEMs/resellers, if it is to increase its growth
substantially.
 Sales execution: Kony's sales growth rate is less than that of some of its most visible
competitors among the nonmegavendor platform providers. The company's decision to
focus on profitability and a lean operation, while justified from one perspective, may put
it at a disadvantage to competitors that spend more aggressively.
 Marketing execution: To attract SMBs, Kony has a free offering that organizations can
try out. This has helped significantly increase the number of registered developers trying
Kony's platform, but Kony has yet to convert many of them into paying customers or
establish a vibrant developer community like that of React Native.

Mendix
Mendix is again a Leader. Its MADP offers strong support for multiple developer
personas, with a focus on model-driven, high-productivity development. Mendix has
over 750 paying customers, mostly SMBs. Many of these have been customers for a
long time, but Mendix's base of enterprise customers has been growing faster in recent
years.
The Mendix platform is cloud-based, with a large percentage of its customers operating
in the public cloud. The Mendix Web Modeler development tool enables visual
development of simple apps, rapid prototyping, and collaboration between citizen and
professional developers. For professional development, there is Mendix's Desktop
Modeler, a rich-client IDE that supports high-productivity development with more
 extensibility options for the developer. A key aspect of Mendix Web Modeler and
Desktop Modeler is that there is bidirectional app collaboration and creation capability,
including a portal for managing the development life cycle. This enables better
collaboration and encourages continuous improvement within blended teams. Mendix's
back-end services offer SDKs for development of apps outside Web Modeler and
Desktop Modeler.

Strengths

 Product offering: Mendix offers high-productivity development tools for both IT

developers and citizen developers. SAP (via an OEM arrangement) and IBM (through a
partnership) have positioned Mendix's MADP as a supplementary high-productivity tool
offering within their respective MADPs. Mendix also provides solid DevOps capabilities
and support for full life cycle management of apps.
 Market understanding: Mendix's current MADP offering and roadmap demonstrate that
it understands large organizations' requirements for multiexperience apps and
developer personas. Future roadmap items include investments in emerging
technologies, specifically IoT, AI and AR support for use cases across lines of business
and industries.
 Marketing strategy: Mendix continues to evolve and expand its marketing reach through
partner and developer community programs. It has also launched the Mendix University
Program, which offers guidance and support for student curriculum and course work
with a focus on model-driven development using the Mendix platform. This approach is
already being taught at 45 universities.

Cautions

 Customer experience: Although Mendix has a very strong renewal rate and account
growth, reference customers gave it a below-average score for overall satisfaction with
its MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. More than
half of its surveyed reference customers said they would recommend Mendix to others,
but with qualifications. In particular, they reported below-average customer service and
support and developer training and support.
 Sales execution and pricing: Mendix's reference customers gave lower-than-average
scores for its contract negotiation and software-licensing policies. They appreciate
Mendix's simple pricing model, but this appreciation has not translated into improved
satisfaction scores from those that have actually implemented its platform.
 Geographic strategy: Mendix has a strong presence in the U.S., followed by EMEA.
However, it has no offices or staff in Latin America or Asia/Pacific and very little market
awareness there. Mendix plans to use partnerships with SAP and IBM to expand in
those markets.

Microsoft
 Microsoft is again a Leader. Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in 2016, remains a
staple of the professional development capabilities of Microsoft's MADP, while the
customer base for its PowerApps high-productivity tool is growing. A very large number
of enterprise customers use PowerApps, and use of Xamarin has increased significantly
since Microsoft acquired it.
Microsoft's platform includes professional development tools that feature Xamarin in
Visual Studio. Visual Studio App Center has become the centerpiece of Microsoft's
mobile app life cycle development support. For its back-end services, Microsoft
continues to expand the capabilities of Azure, which is a true PaaS with mobile-specific
functionality as just one of its components. For citizen developers, Microsoft continues
to improve PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, although there is, as yet, no connection or
bidirectional collaboration between these high-productivity tools and the professional
development options (except for Azure Functions and services).

Strengths

 Overall viability: Since acquiring Xamarin in 2016, enterprises' interest in Microsoft as a

MADP vendor has increased drastically. Having lost the consumer mobile OS battle to
Google (with Android) and Apple (with iOS), Microsoft is investing heavily in
development tools for mobile apps (and more) to ensure its relevance to developers.
Reference customers expressed above-average overall satisfaction with Microsoft's
MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
 Innovation: Microsoft continues to invest in Azure back-end services that support mobile
and multiexperience development. It also continues to invest in tools for multiple
developer personas, including professional and citizen developers. Additionally, it
continues to increase its support for emerging technologies through the Windows Mixed
Reality platform and Azure Bot Service.
 Market understanding: Microsoft understands that professional developers continually
need new tools for multiexperience development and DevOps practices. Microsoft fulfills
these needs by delivering a best-of-breed IDE (Visual Studio) and its open-source
Visual Studio Code editor, while offering integrated DevOps support through Visual
Studio App Center.

Cautions

 Sales execution and pricing: Microsoft's licensing models can be complex. The

Microsoft MADP comprises many different tools that are often licensed differently,
based on numbers of users and transactions. This makes it difficult to estimate ongoing
development costs.
 High-productivity app development tool: Although Microsoft offers a high-productivity
development tool (PowerApps), it lacks tight integration with its own professional
developer tools. The components shared by the tools are primarily Azure Functions,
Logic Apps and Azure API Management, and the tool roadmaps are managed by
separate Microsoft product organizations.
 Marketing execution: Microsoft's MADP offering comprises many tools and services
under the Visual Studio, Azure and PowerApps brandings, which causes some
confusion in the market. The practice of assigning separate brand names (PowerApps
and Visual Studio, for example, are completely distinct names) undermines its
marketing of a single MADP.

MobileFrame
MobileFrame is again a Niche Player. The company has been in the mobile app
development market for 17 years, with a strong presence in the manufacturing and
energy sectors (including utilities whose staff use ruggedized Windows devices).
MobileFrame is privately owned and profitable, and has a large installed base of
enterprise customers (over 2,400), typically in business units.
The MobileFrame platform is designed primarily for on-premises use, running on
servers with Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server. Although the
platform can run in the cloud, most customer implementations are on-premises. The
platform takes a drag-and-drop approach to creating and deploying mobile apps using
proprietary, native runtime app containers for iOS, Android and Windows devices
(including Windows phones, tablets and desktops), but has a fully published API for
developers. Its Thin Client Server also extends apps to run in web browsers. The
MobileFrame back end enables integration with systems of record, typically via web-
based service connectors and Object Linking and Embedding Database (OLE
DB)/Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant systems. MobileFrame's MADP
has proved particularly successful at mobilizing field service and direct-to-store
solutions.

Strengths

 High-productivity app-building tool: MobileFrame's no-code development approach not

only supports the front-end app creation process, but also extends to back-end data
binding and API creation. Reference customers scored this high-productivity
development capability as above average.
 Sales execution: Despite its small size and limited market presence, MobileFrame has
acquired many small and midsize enterprise customers. It offers compelling value for
customers that desire a no-code development tool for integrating, building and
developing mobile apps.
 Overall viability: MobileFrame is a privately owned and profitable business with a tightly
run operation. It continues to support customers, even on Windows Mobile devices, so
investing in its technology is a viable option for the long term.

Cautions

 Customer experience: Reference customers reported below-average overall satisfaction

with MobileFrame's MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this Magic
Quadrant. In particular, satisfaction with its service and support, professional services,
 and developer training and support was below average. However, MobileFrame does
have many long-standing, satisfied customers.
 Offering strategy: MobileFrame does not yet support containerization for cloud
deployment using Docker or Kubernetes, despite this support becoming common in the
MADP sector. MobileFrame is deployed mostly on-premises, with some private cloud
deployments. Reference customers identified its capabilities for core back-end services
and UI richness and native API support as among the weakest in this Magic Quadrant.
However, its platform architecture offers extensibility for supporting multiexperience
development, such as via Google Dialogflow integration and the ability to write custom
add-ons supporting chatbot and AR services.
 Professional developer enablement tools: MobileFrame's platform may not be well-
suited to code-centric app development organizations. Although MobileFrame's no-code
platform has built-in version control and supports dynamic app updates, organizations
looking to enable code-centric distributed teams and continuous integration/continuous
delivery (CI/CD) processes may find its approach limiting. Also, creating customer-
branded native apps outside the standard MobileFrame mobile app container requires
professional services and involved additional licensing costs.

Oracle
Oracle is again a Leader. Oracle continues to build on a strong vision for a platform that
offers high-productivity and professional developer tools for building mobile and
multiexperience apps, although the market's awareness of its offering has not increased
as quickly as for other vendors. Oracle has steadily increased its base of MADP
customers (to over 800), many of them being existing users of Oracle enterprise
applications.
Oracle Mobile Cloud Enterprise (OMCe) includes a high-productivity development tool,
Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX), which supports both professional and citizen
developers of mobile apps. MAX can be used in conjunction with Oracle's Visual Builder
Cloud Service (VBCS) tool, which is for web app development. Both tools use Oracle's
JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) as their underlying framework. OMCe currently
supports development of web and mobile applications, progressive web apps (PWAs)
and chatbots, and Oracle plans to add support for AR applications soon.

Strengths

 Market understanding: Oracle has focused on adding features and functionality to

support the full life cycle of multiexperience development, not only from a development
perspective, but also in terms of analytics, bot framework and DevOps. This
demonstrates Oracle's understanding of how important building multiexperience apps
will be to businesses during the next few years.
 Innovation: Oracle continues to expand its MADP offering both organically and through
acquisitions. Oracle's current research and development (R&D) focus includes AI-
hosted services, immersive technologies and bots (including Oracle's own branded
digital assistant).
 Overall viability: Oracle has the resources, roadmap and commitment to compete in the
MADP market across multiple industries and regions. Over the past three years, it has
built its MADP from the ground up to be competitive in a fast-moving market.

Cautions

 UI richness and native OS API support: Oracle MAX creates hybrid apps using Apache
Cordova and relies on third-party Cordova plug-ins to support native OS APIs.
Customers needing richer app experiences tend to use native iOS and Android
development tools or cross-platform frameworks (such as Ionic or Xamarin) instead,
along with OMCe.
 Marketing strategy: Although Oracle has a strong understanding of the MADP market,
its messaging is often unclear. It seems to treat its tools as separate products, rather
than as a single integrated MADP. Oracle aims its messaging at IT departments, but
awareness of its development tools within business units is limited.
 Market responsiveness: Oracle has sometimes not been timely in fulfilling its product
roadmap. For example, work to integrate its MAX and VBCS tools has been ongoing for
more than a year. Although Oracle has a Cloud Marketplace, it offers a sparse range of
mobile components and extensions.

OutSystems
OutSystems is again a Leader. It markets a high-productivity development platform with
which to rapidly build a unified user experience across mobile, web, SMS, email, chat
and voice service touchpoints. A very large number of organizations use the free edition
of OutSystems' product. A smaller number (approximately 1,100) are paying customers,
with many of these being SMBs.
The OutSystems platform uses a visual-modeling language to create app UI, logic, data
synchronization (for offline use) and integration with its back-end system. Customers
can extend its visual models using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript for
the UI; Objective-C, Swift and Java for the native capabilities; and C#, Java and SQL for
the back-end capabilities. OutSystems' proprietary Silk UI framework is used across the
platform for development of apps for the web, tablets and mobile phones using a hybrid
approach that also uses HTML5 and Apache Cordova. OutSystems offers core mobile
services and SDKs for third-party tools for each back-end API, with complete models
and documentation of API entities.

Strengths

 Product offering: In addition to mobile apps, over 90% of OutSystems' customers use its
platform to create mobile websites or portals (B2C, B2B or B2E). Correspondingly,
reference customers identified its MADP as easy to use, with a short learning curve. All
user interactions are automatically registered, with identification of user, app,
screen/step and actions performed by a user, to promote continuous improvement of
the user experience.
 Innovation: OutSystems recently launched an AI-assisted analysis tool to help
customers monitor the impact of app development on their overall business strategy by
delivering insight into what are the truly impactful initiatives. This helps OutSystems
evolve its platform to support new approaches that will drive automation and make
insights more accessible as apps become more widely adopted.
 Customer experience: Reference customers expressed above-average overall
satisfaction with OutSystems' MADP, in comparison to those of other vendors in this
Magic Quadrant. OutSystems' reference customers praised the platform's ease of use,
which is achieved through the availability of prebuilt objects and widgets, and the ability
to rapidly build and deploy apps in low- or zero-code environments.

Cautions

 Pricing: Some reference customers expressed concerns about OutSystems' licensing.

They reported, for example, that the licensing scheme is initially hard to understand and
that the practice of licensing by application objects requires tight management when
architecting a solution.
 Professional developer enablement tool: Although OutSystems received above-average
scores for its professional developer tools, some reference customers pointed to
missing deployment features, such as the ability to generate app-native code for
different versions and platforms. They also expressed a desire for .ipa and .apk binary
generation not to be dependent on an external OutSystems cloud service.
 Geographic strategy: Although OutSystems has an established network of reseller and
delivery partners, some reference customers indicated that more service provider
partners are needed, as the lack of options in some regions had left them with inflexible
and inefficient delivery partners.

Pega
Pega is again a Visionary. The company markets its MADP as a multiexperience
platform that provides high-productivity and professional developer tools, along with AI
to predict the next best actions and enable personalization. Of the vendors in this Magic
Quadrant, Pega has one of the smaller MADP customer bases (fewer than 300
customers), but some of its customers have very large numbers of users.
With its latest software release, Pega Infinity, the Pega platform includes App Studio, a
no-code app-building tool for citizen developers. It also includes Designer Studio, which
enables a full range of model-driven development and supports custom code using
JavaScript. Multiexperience development is enabled through its platform services.
Chatbot capabilities can be supported through native and third-party chatbot
frameworks via APIs, with prebuilt modules for Facebook Messenger and Amazon
Alexa. The Pega platform has a built-in web and mobile chat capability that uses its
native chatbot engine. Wearables (specifically smartwatches) are supported by the
Pega Mobile Client. Pega builds app binaries using its own proprietary native
containers, but its mobile back end offers SDKs for native iOS, Android, Windows 10,
Apache Cordova and React Native development.
 Strengths

 Market understanding: To meet the market's needs, Pega has continued to improve its
platform by, for example, adding multiexperience design tools. Additions include a
native bot framework and core conversational UI APIs.
 Innovation: The Pega platform comes with native AI, including support for full
transparency control between opaque AI (machine learning) and transparent AI. Third-
party AI models can be imported into the Customer Decision Hub (CDH).
 Process, workflow and data modeling: The Pega platform offers case flows, process
flows and application-specific flows that can be modeled natively in the system. These
features, combined with customer journey visualization and a decision hub repository
for all customer interactions, enable developers to design continuous customer
experiences.

Cautions

 Services: Reference customers expressed lower-than-average satisfaction with Pega's

professional services. Additionally, the time to deployment is longer than the overall
average, although typically not more than six months.
 Sales execution and pricing: Pega is one of the larger vendors in terms of overall
revenue, but it has fewer MADP customers than most of the vendors in this Magic
Quadrant (although some of its enterprise clients report hundreds of thousands of end
users). Also, Pega's prices tend to be at the high end for this market.
 Marketing execution: Although Gartner has seen a dramatic increase in client inquiries
about Pega, year over year, there is still a significant lack of awareness among potential
customers that Pega has a solid MADP offering. Pega needs to do even more to raise
awareness of its presence in the MADP market.

Progress
Progress Software is a Visionary (it was a Leader in the previous Magic Quadrant). In
addition to undertaking platform rebranding and product portfolio rationalization, in 2017
Progress acquired Kinvey, a mobile back-end services provider, to augment its MADP
capabilities for enterprise developers. Progress has one of the largest numbers of
paying MADP customers (over 25,000), but most are in SMBs.
Progress has shifted its platform away from a focus on hybrid app development on
Apache Cordova to its own open-source NativeScript cross-platform framework for iOS
and Android. Its Kendo UI Builder and NativeScript Sidekick offer visual components
and templates that can be used to construct responsive web, PWA and mobile app UIs.
Progress also offers an IntelliJ/WebStorm and Microsoft Visual Studio IDE plug-in. The
Kinvey product replaces the back-end components gained when Progress acquired
Telerik in 2014, and offers SDKs for all popular native and cross-platform development
frameworks. Progress' platform supports Docker and Kubernetes for multicloud
deployment, but Cloud Foundry is not supported.
 Strengths

 Market understanding: Progress entered the MADP market when it acquired Telerik in

2014, and has since improved its platform, most recently through the acquisition of
Kinvey. As the creator of, and a key contributor to, the NativeScript open-source
framework, Progress is in a strong positon to capitalize on the growth of native cross-
platform frameworks (although the enterprise market's awareness of NativeScript is less
than for Xamarin and React Native).
 Professional developer enablement tools: NativeScript is a solid JavaScript-based
framework for building iOS and Android apps that can access all native OS APIs.
Progress' rich platform SDKs also help increase the productivity of developers. In
addition, Progress offers a command line interface that is fully featured and the
backbone of all integrations.
 Innovation: Progress' new NativeChat product is an AI-driven platform for creating and
deploying chatbots. The platform also provides serverless cloud services that can
support multiexperience development, including for Alexa Skills and IoT devices, as well
as ingestion of machine learning models from its DataRPM predictive analytics platform.

Cautions

 Sales and marketing strategy: For its size, Progress has a small dedicated sales team
supporting its MADP. Historically, Progress has attracted developers through a low-
touch, online sales channel. As it targets more enterprise buyers, Progress has started
to move to a more enterprise-oriented sales and marketing go-to-market approach.
 High-productivity app development tool: Progress has changed its low-code front-end
development mobile app tool by focusing on NativeScript and moving away from its
previous Apache Cordova-based app development tool. The new tool, NativeScript
Sidekick, is unproven and immature, compared with other MADP vendors' high-
productivity development tools.
 Geographic strategy: Clients in Latin America and Asia/Pacific may struggle to find
delivery partners and resellers. Progress has started to expand more into Asia/Pacific,
but the vast majority of its MADP staff, partners and customers are still located in North
America and EMEA.

Red Hat
Red Hat is again a Niche Player. It offers the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform
(RHMAP), which is fully integrated with OpenShift, Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes
platform offering, and provides enterprises with an entry point to cloud-native application
development. Red Hat supports paying enterprise customers globally and offers a free
90-day evaluation product.
RHMAP offers a no-code Forms Builder with drag-and-drop functionality for creating
hybrid mobile apps and web apps. The RHMAP cloud-based Build Farm can generate
Android and iOS binaries for native (Swift, Objective-C and Java), Apache Cordova and
 Xamarin projects. Red Hat offers SDKs for native iOS and Android, and cross-platform
frameworks (Apache Cordova and Xamarin, with partial support for React Native). The
RHMAP back end provides Node.js and Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform, and
supports integration with other Red Hat middleware services for shared business
processes, rules and integration logic across touchpoints. RHMAP is available both as a
Red Hat-hosted solution and for self-managed deployment. Server-side enhancements
to applications can be made easily with Node.js.

Strengths

 Professional developer enablement tools: RHMAP offers a hosted Build Farm that

enables creation of native binaries for iOS, Android and Windows. Its Node.js-based
mobile back end deployed on OpenShift enables scalability and reuse, with many
components available for emerging capabilities (such as conversational app
integration).
 Core mobile services and connectors and API mediation: Red Hat's platform includes
features that streamline app creation. These include API Mapper, which enables simple
point-and-click interactions with back-end APIs and the creation of new APIs. The
platform also offers built-in MongoDB and Redis instances.
 DevOps support: RHMAP is designed as a containerized solution to be run on
OpenShift. The platform offering has robust support for testing, continuous delivery and
DevOps. RHMAP can be deployed in both multitenant public cloud and on-premises
environments. OpenShift Dedicated — the cloud-hosted instance of OpenShift — can
be deployed on all major cloud providers' infrastructure, including that of Microsoft
(Azure), AWS and Google (Cloud Platform).

Cautions

 UI richness and native API support: The RHMAP Forms Builder tool is dependent on
Apache Cordova and has limited UI extensibility. Red Hat supports many third-party
open-source components to deliver added functionality. Customers will need to manage
all third-party components, as Red Hat does not offer a curated marketplace (unlike
some MADP vendors).
 Innovation: Red Hat has not made any significant progress in differentiating its offering
in terms of adding advanced capabilities, such as support for multiexperience
development. It has spent the past year working on fully integrating mobile services into
OpenShift, rather than improving the high-productivity development capabilities sought
by many enterprises.
 Marketing strategy: Although RHMAP uses open-source standards, such as Cordova
and Node.js, Red Hat has failed to use the associated open-source communities to
promote its MADP. Additionally, RHMAP's position within Red Hat's middleware
business appears to have weakened its messaging for developers.

Resco
 A new entrant to the Magic Quadrant, Resco is a Niche Player. The company markets
its MADP as a high-productivity development platform on which to build apps for any
mobile device. Of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Resco has one of the larger
customer bases (over 2,000 customers), with most being SMBs.
The Resco Cloud platform supports mobile phones, tablets, PCs, smartwatches and
smartglasses. It uses JavaScript for low-code front-end development. Xamarin is used
for building native apps in Resco Cloud's client runtime. Resco Cloud provides mobile
UI controls based on native OS controls, with access to the Resco controls available via
API or configuration tool. Resco Woodford is the platform's professional development
tool with its own proprietary IDE that supports Microsoft's Windows 7 and Windows 10,
Apple's watchOS, and Google's Wear OS and Glass OS. The platform does not provide
SDKs for Android or iOS; instead, JavaScript must be used to access back-end
services.

Strengths

 Industry strategy: Resco has a very broad customer base spanning many industries.
This strengthens its overall viability in the competitive MADP market.
 Product strategy: Resco Cloud is popular with Microsoft-centric organizations as it has
prebuilt connectors for Microsoft Dynamics 365, support for Windows 7 and Windows
10, and uses Xamarin for the client runtime.
 Geographic strategy: Of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Resco has one of the
largest customer bases and one of the more geographically diverse. It also has many
resellers and delivery partners in multiple regions, which help it support implementations
and provide customer support.

Cautions

 Core back-end services with connectors and API mediation: Although Resco Cloud
supports Open Data Protocol (OData) and REST, it does not offer API mediation
capabilities. It also lacks support for NoSQL, unstructured data storage and cognitive
services.
 Innovation: Resco Cloud does not support virtual assistants, such as Apple Siri,
Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana. Also lacking is support for
third-party chatbots, bot frameworks and mobile AR. Consistency across touchpoints
extends only to synchronization of data; there is no remembrance of state.
 Product strategy: Resco's mobile roadmap focuses on supporting and enhancing its
own CRM and SaaS applications. As a result, Resco has limited applicability for broader
enterprise use cases.

Salesforce
Salesforce is a Visionary (it was a Leader in the previous Magic Quadrant). Following a
rebranding of some of its MADP components in 2017, Salesforce's MADP now consists
 of Lightning Platform and Salesforce Mobile products. Although Salesforce does not
report the number of its MADP customers specifically, Gartner estimates it has one of
the largest customer bases and significant presence in both SMBs and enterprises.
The Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Force.com) consists of Lightning App
Builder, Lightning Flow, Salesforce DX, Heroku and the Salesforce Mobile App (formerly
the Salesforce1 app), which can now be completely rebranded by customers using
mySalesforce. Lightning App Builder supports the creation of web and mobile apps, and
can draw on Lightning components built using JavaScript and XML. Professional
developers have access to Salesforce Mobile SDKs for native IDEs and popular cross-
platform frameworks. The platform runs only on Salesforce Cloud, although it can
seamlessly integrate with Heroku, which can run in Docker containers and natively on
AWS.

Strengths

 Customer experience: Salesforce's reference customers said they chose Salesforce's

MADP mainly to improve operational efficiency. They reported one of the highest levels
of overall satisfaction in the Magic Quadrant survey. They gave Salesforce exceptionally
high scores for software licensing (which includes mobile licensing), integration and
deployment, meeting their expectations, service and support, and developer training
and support.
 High-productivity app development tool: Lightning App Builder is a compelling no-code
development tool to help citizen developers (such as Salesforce administrators)
construct web and mobile apps and easily deploy them via the Salesforce Mobile App
container. Its Lightning Flow tools (Process Builder and Cloud Flow Designer), in
conjunction with Salesforce Platform Events, enable administrators (and professional
developers) to declaratively create workflows and business processes that generate
and react to event-based architectures.
 Innovation: Customers can embark on multiexperience development using Salesforce
Platform Events and SDKs. Salesforce also has a strategic partnership with Amazon
that includes Trailhead content on designing integrations with Amazon Alexa. The
Salesforce Wear initiative provides developer packs for AR for devices such as the Myo
armband, Google Glass and Oculus Rift.

Cautions

 Business model: Most of Salesforce's MADP customers are existing users of Salesforce

enterprise applications, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Although the Lightning
Platform is a capable development platform, Salesforce's business model may not give
it the best chance of growing strongly as a stand-alone MADP. On the other hand, there
are many customers that exclusively use Salesforce Heroku as an application
development and hosting platform.
 UI richness and native API support: Among the few negatives that reference customers
reported were below-average capabilities for delivering UI richness. Although the
 Salesforce Mobile App and mySalesforce, along with Lightning App Builder, make it
easy to deploy apps, UI controls and native API access are limited by the capabilities of
the app container.
 Behavioral analytics and engagement: Salesforce supports URL-level analytics out-of-
the-box, but for more detailed behavioral analytics customers have to use third-party
products. Operational analytics, such as those that analyze crashes and performance,
are also lacking.

SAP
SAP is a Visionary (it was a Niche Player in the previous Magic Quadrant). SAP's ability
to deliver a compelling stand-alone, general-purpose MADP has improved, thanks to an
OEM relationship with Mendix, which gives SAP a very competitive high-productivity
development platform. SAP's MADP customers include customers of SAP's business
applications, especially on-premises (although the number of its cloud business
application customers is growing).
SAP's MADP uses several technologies, including Fiori app templates, SAPUI5 hybrid
and native SDKs, and model-driven apps, all of which deliver a common Fiori user
experience. SAP Web IDE is the company's professional developer tool for building web
and hybrid apps. SAP Build is currently a no-code tool for app prototyping, although
SAP has expressed an intention to add low-code development capabilities in 2018.
Professional developers also have access to SDKs for Apache Cordova, and Fiori-
oriented SDKs for iOS (in partnership with Apple) and Android (in partnership with
Google). These SDKs accelerate development of native apps, giving iOS and Android
developers the ability to use native Fiori design elements. The SAP Cloud Platform
delivers core mobile services, as well as SAP API Management and SAP App Lab for
deployment orchestration. SAP does not offer an on-premises solution. Its platform is
strictly a multitenant public cloud offering on the SAP Cloud Platform.

Strengths

 Overall viability: SAP's MADP architecture has moved from the legacy SAP Mobile
Platform to SAP Cloud in recent years. The company's investments in mobility, such as
in SAP Build, a mobile card kit feature, and strong SDK offerings demonstrate continued
commitment to deliver comprehensive mobile development tools.
 Connectors and API mediation: A broad range of connectors is provided for SAP
systems, including S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Hybris, Ariba and Concur, as well as
popular third-party SaaS applications. SAP Cloud Platform Integration enables
"composite APIs" with its orchestration capabilities. Reference customers gave above
average-satisfaction scores for integration and deployment, in comparison to those of
other vendors in this Magic Quadrant
 Market responsiveness: SAP's decision to offer the Mendix platform on an OEM basis
fills a significant gap in its capabilities for high-productivity development. This offering
has been well received by SAP customers and will be enhanced by integration with SAP
Web IDE.
 Cautions

 Marketing execution: Whereas the branding of SAP Mobile Platform was distinct, SAP's
MADP is now a collection of components within SAP Cloud Platform. This is confusing
for customers. Enterprises view SAP's mobile platform as Fiori apps or legacy tools
(such as the Syclo apps), which indicates a poor and disjointed mobile development
value proposition.
 Offering strategy: SAP has decided to focus its efforts on the SAP Cloud Platform and
has de-emphasized work on the on-premises solutions that many SAP customers still
use for their SAP applications. This cloud-only approach limits what some legacy SAP
customers can do and also changes their cost of ownership model. Reference
customers reported below-average satisfaction with SAP's software licensing.
 High-productivity app-building tool: Although a step in the right direction, SAP's OEM
arrangement with Mendix could cause confusion and destroy confidence in the
platform's own built-in high-productivity tool. SAP will need to clarify the roadmap and
positioning of these tools to avoid too much overlap.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As
a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change
over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does
not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a
reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a
change of focus by that vendor.

Added
 ApiOmat
 Appian
 Betty Blocks
 Resco

Dropped
 Adobe
 Axway (Appcelerator)

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Vendors in this year's Magic Quadrant had to meet the following criteria:
 The vendor must demonstrate a go-to-market strategy for its MADP, by, for example,
marketing on its website a platform to create custom mobile apps for, at minimum, iOS
and Android devices, responsive web and other touchpoints.
 The platform must, at minimum, offer support for developing mobile web, desktop web
and mobile apps, and should support at least one additional channel (chatbot, wearable
or AR).
 The platform must offer back-end services that support integration with heterogeneous
enterprise systems and core mobile services such as offline synchronization and
location services.
 The platform must, at minimum, support additional development IDEs (for example,
Apple Xcode, Android Studio, Visual Studio Code and Eclipse) via APIs for its back-end
services.
 The platform must offer a high-productivity (low code/no code) development tool; or the
platform must support professional development via an IDE or integration with a third-
party IDE.
 For a product offered wholly or partly on an OEM basis to be eligible for inclusion, it had
to bear the vendor's branding and be warrantied or maintained by the vendor.
Additionally, the vendor had to be the point of first contact for all problems and/or
services. The vendor also had to have in-house development and support staff for the
OEM portion of the product.
Vendors also had to meet one of the following criteria, at minimum:

 The vendor must generate at least $30 million in annual revenue from software
licensing (not including professional services) for its platform (as defined above).
 The vendor must have added at least 20 new paying enterprise customers with a
minimum of 200 monthly active users for its MADP in 2017, across at least two of the
following regions: North America, Latin America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific.
We excluded vendors that:

 Offer only a platform that only has back-end services (such as a PaaS or mobile back-
end services), without a tool for building app front ends.
 Only sell their software coupled with development/professional services, in case where
the tool is used exclusively by the vendor's consultants.
 Target only a single device platform, such as iOS or Android, or a single channel, such
as the web or chatbots.
 Do not sell a commercial enterprise offering (that is, they offer their solutions only as
open-source software).

Evaluation Criteria
 Ability to Execute
 Product or service: We evaluate for breadth and depth of products and features across
the software development life cycle, with an emphasis on the requirements of mobile
apps. These capabilities include design and user experience capabilities, simplicity of
development, ease of integration, richness of back-end services, and DevOps support
such as CI/CD, testing, version and release management, and analytics.
o High-productivity app building tool— How well does the platform support
nonprogrammers in using a drag-and-drop, model-driven, metadata-driven or other
visual app development approach to creating apps?
o Professional developer enablement tools— How well does the platform provide
developers with a code-centric approach to designing and building cross-platform
mobile apps using an IDE supplied by the MADP or via a plug-in to an existing IDE (for
example, Eclipse or Visual Studio)?
o Core mobile services with connectors and API mediation— How well does the platform
provide reusable, cross-platform mobile services (such as location services, push
notifications, offline synchronization and user management) and support flexible
deployment options (such as private/public cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises)? How
well does the platform provide connectors/adaptors to the systems of record that are
needed and offer extensibility to create and manage mobile-optimized APIs?
o Process, workflow and data modeling— How well does the platform make it easy to
build mobile-specific workflows/processes, support custom app logic and rules/event-
driven interactions to create targeted user experiences?
o UI richness and native OS API support — How well does the platform support a high-
fidelity UI with native look and feel, OS and hardware integration, and native app
performance?
o Unified customer experience— How well does the platform support the development of
experiences that span multiple channels, including the web, virtual personal assistants,
chatbots, wearables and other digital touchpoints? How does it handle state retention?
o Behavioral analytics and engagement— How well does the platform capture granular
app usage analytics, enable business-level reporting, and support the ability to
dynamically update app content and trigger notifications to increase engagement?
o DevOps support— How well does the platform offer embedded tools to support agile
development, CI/CD, test automation, version and release management, and monitoring
analytics to facilitate DevOps?
o AI service support— How well does the platform provide or use hosted AI services
(such as natural language processing, natural language understanding, image
recognition and sentiment analysis) for use within apps?
 Overall viability: We examine R&D spending and resources, growth of mobile business,
and financial profitability or funding/capitalization.
 Sales execution/pricing: We look for a broad sales reach across geographies and
industries, effectiveness of sales operations — in light of, for example, long or short
sales cycles — and the simplicity of pricing models.
 Market responsiveness and track record: We examine how quickly products are
released and adopted, and how new mobile capabilities are supported, both using the
vendor's own resources and through partnerships.
 Marketing execution: We look for general awareness of the vendor in the market, and
any negative or positive perceptions of the vendor across IT and lines of business. We
also consider how easily buyers understand a vendor's differentiators.
 Customer experience: We examine customer deployments across a variety of mobile
app use cases, the vendor's ability to meet and exceed customers' expectations, and
the ease of onboarding and training on its platform. Results from our survey of
reference customers are important measures of customer satisfaction.
 Operations: We look for growth in mobile business operations and staffing, stability in
leadership vision, and strength of customer service.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Low
 Source: Gartner (July 2018)
Completeness of Vision
 Market understanding: We look for an understanding of how to address the needs of IT
departments and lines of business, as well as third-party developers.
 Marketing strategy: We look for strong brand recognition, thought-leading product
messaging, and outreach programs that succeed in a very fragmented and cluttered
mobile market.
 Sales strategy: We look for a strong go-to-market strategy focused on selling a MADP
to enterprise IT departments, lines of business and developers.
 Offering (product) strategy: We look for a strong understanding of enterprise needs
across the mobile software development life cycle. Important here is the provision of a
coherent solution to address multiexperience requirements, high-productivity
development, use of open and standards-based technologies, security and compliance,
and DevOps support through analytics, testing, and version and release management.
 Business model: We examine product revenue growth and ease of doing business with
customers. We also look for a strong partner ecosystem that amplifies the vendor's go-
to-market strategy.
 Vertical/industry strategy: We look for differentiating capabilities built for specific
industries and vertical mobile apps, and a focused go-to-market approach for any
specific industries — including the use of partners.
 Innovation: We look for technological advances that support broader multiexperience
development, and other capabilities that support event-driven architecture, multicloud
deployment and IoT gateways.
 Geographic strategy: We look for diverse customer deployments across geographies,
delivery and reseller partner networks, and market awareness within geographies
across the globe, as well as in-country vendor presence.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

 Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (July 2018)

Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have a strong combination of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. In
the MADP sector, this means that Leaders are not only good at cross-platform
development, deployment and management across the full life cycle, but also
demonstrate strong vision for multiexperience development support. A Leader must also
have open architectures and support open standards, while showing a solid
understanding of IT requirements, and scalable sales channels and partnerships.
Leaders must provide platforms that are easy to purchase, program, deploy and
upgrade, and which can connect to a range of systems of record and third-party cloud
services.

Challengers
Challengers in this market have high numbers of satisfied enterprise clients, a large and
growing base of deployed seats, and the ability to meet the needs of multiple
departments in global rollouts. Challengers are vendors with a history of execution in
the broad market, but they may not yet have accumulated a substantial track record in
the MADP sector across a range of scenarios. Challengers may also lack a cohesive
technical or business vision — or may have lingering product gaps or inconsistent or
incomplete strategies in their product roadmaps.
Visionaries
Visionaries in this market have a compelling vision for their products and for the
market's future, as well as the technical direction and resources to fulfill that vision.
However, they have not yet demonstrated that vision in one or more of the following
areas: history of execution, revenue, size of client base, diversity of solutions and strong
financial results.

Niche Players
Niche Players in this market lack strength in terms of one or more of the following
criteria: product breadth/completeness, strength of vision, geographic reach or number
of customers. A Niche Player may be a good choice for a particular departmental,
regional or industry use case — indeed, for specific scenarios a Niche Player may be
the best choice. However, they are typically not well-suited to providing a broader
platform for use across an enterprise.

Context
For this year's Magic Quadrant, Gartner surveyed 82 reference customers of MADP
vendors. Some key findings emerged, which application leaders should factor into their
planning.
The top three reasons why these customers purchased a MADP were:
1. To create internal operational efficiencies
2. To enable digital transformation
3. To reduce time to market for mobile apps
By comparison, the No. 1 reason in the 2017 survey was "to drive innovation," which
came fourth this year. Digital transformation was not among the top five last year, but is
No. 2 this year. These findings indicate that MADPs are now serving a more specific
role in support of businesses' digital initiatives, as opposed to simply a means of fueling
general innovation.
Over the years, MADP offerings have moved from primarily on-premises software
deployments to the cloud. However, based on the results of our customer survey, the
shift to cloud deployment has stalled. In 2017, 39% of respondents opted for cloud
deployment. In 2018, the percentage is almost unchanged, at 40%. The surprising shift
is the increase in on-premises deployments, at 38% in 2018 versus 31% in 2017. This
was at the expense of hybrid cloud deployments, which dropped to 22% in 2018 from
30% in 2017. Although, through our client inquiry service, we continue to see growing
interest in, and adoption of, cloud offerings, the unexpected rise in on-premises
deployments could be attributed to late adopters, who tend to be more conservative
about cloud adoption. Gartner recommends using MADPs in the cloud, given the high
level of maintenance required to keep up with the constant stream of mobile device and
OS updates.
The 2018 survey also revealed that more companies are implementing MADPs entirely
on their own, using internal IT resources (24% versus 13% in 2017). This increase is
likely due to adoption of containerization technologies (Docker and Kubernetes), as well
as better developer tools and documentation. However, the large majority of customers
still require assistance, either directly from the vendor (35%), from a third-party service
provider (11%), or from both (29%). If your organization is implementing a MADP for the
first time, we recommend using professional services from the vendor and/or a certified
partner. This is especially important if mobile app development is also new to your
organization, as starting from scratch could cause significant delays while new skilled
staff are hired and existing resources are retrained.
MADPs address a broad array of app use cases across an enterprise to meet the needs
of internal and external app users. Our survey indicates that the B2E app use case is
the most common, with 78% of the respondents' organizations building employee-facing
apps, and nearly one in five building more than 10 such apps. The next most common
use case is for B2C app users, with 57% of the respondents' organizations using their
MADP for that purpose. As we would expect, the number of B2C apps built is much
lower, although 14% of respondents have built more than four consumer or customer-
facing apps. The B2B use case is less popular still, but it can help scale mobile app
delivery; 6% of the respondents' organizations have built more than 10 B2B apps.
Gartner recommends evaluating a MADP across all three main use case scenarios
(B2E, B2C and B2B) in order to maximize the platform's ROI. You should not discount
using a MADP for B2C apps, as we have observed successful implementations of
consumer and customer-facing apps in banking, retail, travel and other industries.
Finally, in this section, the top three reasons for the surveyed reference customers to
choose their MADP vendor were:
1. Its high-productivity app development tool
2. The completeness of its platform toolchain
3. Its back-end services and API capabilities
The top two reasons are the same as in 2017, although high-productivity (no or low
code) app development has jumped from No. 2 to No. 1. This reflects the qualification of
hpaPaaS and rapid mobile app development vendors (both types sell high-productivity
tools) for this year's Magic Quadrant. Back-end services and API capabilities were
outside the top five last year, but have risen due to the increasing importance of the API
economy and requirements to support multiexperience development through back-end
services. Gartner recommends using these three reasons as fundamental criteria when
starting your evaluation of MADP vendors and their offerings.

Market Overview
The MADP market includes independent vendors of stand-alone MADPs and larger
vendors whose MADP offerings are part of a broader portfolio or solution. Customers
can, however, purchase any MADP product as a separate offering, although some
MADPs have many optional and related components. Most vendors also offer "free for
evaluation" or open-source tools, which can account for a significant percentage of their
user base.
Over the years, the independent vendors have mostly been acquired by larger vendors
— a trend that addressed the mobility gaps in many enterprise systems. Vendors in
adjacent development tool markets are adding mobile capabilities to their products, so
that they qualify as MADPs: examples are Betty Blocks (additions to a hpaPaaS),
ApiOmat (additions to mobile back-end services) and Resco (additions to a rapid mobile
app development offering).
MADPs serve to bridge the gap between systems of record and systems of innovation.
They enable development of a broader digital app platform that includes the cloud, the
IoT, wearables, conversational UIs and immersive experiences. In the coming years,
Gartner expects the more visionary MADP vendors to evolve into vendors of
multiexperience development platforms (see "Technology Insight for Multiexperience
Development Platforms").
Gartner recommends investing in a MADP as the foundation of a broad digital business
technology platform strategy, but in the knowledge that other tools and technologies will
also be needed (see "Make Digital Business Transformation a Practical Reality: A
Gartner Trend Insight Report").

Evidence
For this Magic Quadrant, Gartner's primary research included analysis of product
demonstrations. We also conducted surveys of vendors and reference customers
identified by vendors between March and April 2018. In addition, information from
Gartner's client inquiry service was used during the evaluation process.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market.
This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on,
whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the
market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial
health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that
the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering
the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of
products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the
structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and
achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history
of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to
deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and
business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification
with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can
be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word
of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable
clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways
customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary
tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups,
service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences,
programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively
and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and
to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of
vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance
those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated
throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend
the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the
customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and
delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as
they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings
to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,
expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that
geography and market.