Zend Technologies, a recent AlwaysOn OnDemand Top 100 winner, released the results of its latest annual Zend Developer Pulse (News – Alert) 2013 Survey, which gathers information from around 5,000 developers worldwide. According to InfoQ, the primary focus of this survey was to investigate key factors affecting the ability of companies to deliver customer engagement and mobile-friendly applications.

Still, it would seem that overall interest in mobile has increased dramatically over the past year, with about 91 percent of developers working on mobile applications, compared to 66 percent in 2012.

Divided into company size, about 91 percent of independent developers — classified as companies with between two and 100 employees — and companies with between 1,001 and 5,000 employees also intend to work on mobile apps this year. Additionally, 90 percent of developers from companies with 100 to 1,000 employees intend to develop mobile apps, along with 83 percent from companies with over 5,000 employees.

In terms of app capabilities, 59 percent of respondents said they prefer geo-location support, while 45 percent named client/server data mapping as a priority. Native push notifications came in third with 44 percent of the vote, followed by API provisioning and interoperability with social platforms with 39 and 37 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, HTML5, along with other Web technologies, was regarded as the preferred method of content delivery by 79 percent of respondents. A combined approach of native and Web apps was chosen by 33 percent of respondents, with 26 percent opting for Objective C and Java. Finally, 12 percent said they were unaware of mobile technologies but are still willing to deliver to the mobile audience.

This data seems to run counter to recent data from Gartner, which says that a hybrid app approach, which offers a balance between HTML5 and native apps, will be used in more than half of mobile apps by 2016. Either way, it seems that HTML5’s prominence in the mobile industry is assured.