Embedded developers prefer Linux, live Android

Embedded developers prefer Linux, live Android

 Developers plan to use Linux in half of their upcoming embedded projects, according to preliminary data from an annual EE Times embedded market survey. And Android leads the Linux pack.

The data from EE Times’s “2013 Embedded Market Study” were disclosed to embedded market executives by UBM Tech vice president David Blaza and EE Times editor-in-chief Alex Wolfe at Embedded World in Nuremburg last week.

Blaza and Wolfe said Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey’s participants, placing it ahead of all other OSes other than “in-house/custom” (see chart below).

Embedded OS developer preferences, February 2013

(click to enlarge; source: EE Times “2013 Embedded Market Study”)

In-house top choice. Really?

According to EE Times, the “in-house/custom” option remained embedded developers’ top choice, at 28 percent, an increase from last year’s 24 percent.

But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate of the various shades of Linux to see how they compare?

Will the real survey winner please stand up

To better understand Linux’s share of the embedded market we sliced and diced the Linux variants’ percentages using the EE Times study’s data. The results are tabulated below.

           2013 Embedded Market Study Linux percentages

As indicated by the table, “Linux” is expected to be used in 50 percent of upcoming embedded projects, an increase from last year’s 46 percent. Parsing the EE Times data this way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market.

EE Times collected its survey data from 2,000 respondents, mostly located in North America and Europe, between Jan. 17 and Feb. 13, 2013. The full EE TImes “Embedded Market Study 2013″ officially launches next month at the big DesignWest conference in San Jose, CA, the publication said. An article about the preliminary study results (on which this post is based) can be found here.

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