A report from IT analysts Gartner has revealed the global app development market will overtake £5.7 billion ($9bn) by the end of 2012.

Asheesh Raina, Gartner principal research analyst, said: “Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing”.

Gartner decreed evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source software as growth factors for app development.

There was also mention of the cloud in terms of the rise in app development; cost, agility, flexibility and speed are the key reasons why app developers would want to “cloud-enable” their software.

The report, entitled ‘Market Trends: Application Development Software Worldwide, 2012-2016’, discussed the effects of open source software in terms of app development.

OS adoption will gather apace in the next few years “especially as open source becomes a key element of the software quality landscape beyond the developer level”.

Gartner forecast that more than 70% of new enterprise Java apps will be deployed on open source Java servers in five years’ time.

Java currently sits in second place in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, as of August 2012, behind C as the most popular programming language – this time last year, however, it was at the top spot.

Citing the examples of companies such as Eclipse and NetBeans, Raina added: “Open source software tools will continue to erode revenue for some application development categories in design, testing and web development”.

But do you agree? Is the cloud responsible for the rise in app development?