An “impressive” 65 per cent of Internet of Things (IoT) apps in production today are generating “real revenue”, according to a survey from Harbor Research for tools company Progress.

Developers expect this figure to rise to 80 per cent by 2018.

When asked which industries are key to IoT app development, respondents cited smart homes (19 per cent), wearables (13 per cent), automotive (11 per cent) and sports/fitness (11 per cent) – and these were also named as having the highest IoT app revenue.

In contrast, the public sector was at the bottom of the list (4 per cent).

But a shift is expected in the next three to five years, with healthcare (14 per cent), smart cities (13 per cent) and automotive (12 per cent) mooted as the top three industries for development and revenue generation.

And the public sector will also see a boost, to match the wearables market.

In terms of platforms, developers cited Android as the best OS for building apps for IoT devices (29 per cent), followed by Windows (24 per cent), Linux (21 per cent) and iOS (16 per cent).

Key issues for developers are security and personal privacy; data privacy and protection from malicious attack; and general integration and data management. The most likely parties to help overcome these are commercial vendors (31 per cent) and the open source community (24 per cent) rather than government (8 per cent) or industry bodies (7 per cent).

The survey polled 675 application developers from the US, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands and India, of which 45 per cent are developing IoT apps. Developers based in the US are most active in developing IoT apps, followed by Netherlands and Germany.